Right in front of you. You're reading a small part of the "book" right now. Wie, bitte? used to be a printed book, with workbook, tapes, test manual and a little software to use on the side. Here's a picture of its cover:

Starting almost twenty years ago, Wie, bitte? was transferred to electronic form (not yet on the internet), and entirely new types of content were added, along with much more media and much more use of color graphics.

Why do that, other than the sheer fun of spending a couple thousand hours working on the project? Here are some reasons:

1) Although publishers do not make a killing on textbooks (nor do most textbook authors), the cost of textbooks has become horrendous. Labor is more expensive, content changes rapidly as the world changes so rapidly, and conventional materials are getting more expensive (or controversial to use - paper comes from trees). Also, students now often re-sell their textbooks after they use them, which cuts down on sales of new books and therefore pushes the price up.

2) Most instructional content can be delivered both more cheaply and more effectively with modern technology. Digital sound from CD(ROM) or the internet maintains its quality better than analog sound on cassette tapes, which must be copied several times before the student gets the cassette. Printing in color is very expensive. Digital graphics in color "cost" relatively little in storage, even compared to black-and-white images, and certainly compared to ink on paper.

3) Point #2 is important because language instruction, as it is conducted in first-year German at PSU, needs lots of multimedia, both to convey the language for communicative use, and to bring the other culture to the learner.

4) Electronic content can be updated far more rapidly than can the materials in conventionally published books. Time between new editions of the latter is about four years, but much of the "new" materials the new edition will necessarily be more than four years old by the time the book is published. By contrast, the edition of Wie, bitte? that was introduced in the fall of 2003 contained two hundred new images from 2002. Still newer images were added in 2007. And, of course, the list of German-related websites can be updated rapidly.

It is worthwhile compare prices and quantities a little more here. A conventional textbook package for an introductory language course can easily cost $150. Your expenses for Wie, bitte? materials can be as little as a few dollars, or nothing at all if you prefer to use only the CD-ROM. But Wie, bitte? also delivers far more media than does a conventional text. There are currently more than 600 graphics, most of them in color. Conventional textbooks have far fewer, and many are printed small. And of course a given picture will be printed only once in a book, even if it would be useful to have it on several different pages. Since a digital graphics on a CD-ROM or web server can be called from as many links as a person chooses, the graphics in Wie, bitte? are used more frequently and intensely than those in ink-on-paper books. Much the same goes for sound.

5) Portability and convenience. Students walk around bent over carrying backpacks, or pulling carts, filled with heavy textbooks. The Wie, bitte? CD-ROM has as many words in it as conventional textbooks, and far more pictures. The same disk houses many of the sounds. Even if you carry your photocopy package with you, the total weight and volume are considerably less. Use Wie, bitte? from the internet and the weight and volume are still less - in fact zero, aside from your computer.

6) The last point may be one of the most important: electronic technology is both faster and more interactive than conventional books used without electronic resources. A piece of paper cannot respond to your writing the way software can. A teacher using email can evaluate your activities faster than a teacher who collects homework, takes it home, corrects it (whatever that means), and brings it back to give to you the next time you are in class.

Again, you can mouse a link on your screen and hear a sound immediately - and the right sound, where with a book and a cassette you can waste a lot of time hunting for what may turn out to be the wrong sound if you don't have exactly the right stretch of tape and some way of having to confirm the identity of the segment in this language you are still just learning. These advantages pay off again in the classroom, in the form of much less time wasted literally getting everyone on the same page, or having the class wait while the instructor digs up a sound on a cassette.

But there are disadvantages to recent technology. That is why major parts of Wie, bitte? are available in conventional, though simple, form, as ink printed on paper. The word-processing files for much of that materials are also available as .pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files, for people who have access to cheap or cost-free printing and thus prefer not to buy the photocopy package.

If you want to know more about how Wie, bitte? is produced and why it is the way it is, please email Dr. Fischer to arrange a personal appointment.