Jan. 3

E-Textbooks — for Real This Time?

It’s the central paradox of 21st-century college students: Despite embracing radically new ways of communicating with each other and learning about the world, they still remain wedded to the old-fashioned, paper-bound textbook.

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That steadfast commitment to the printed page isn’t shared only by students. But sensing an opportunity among early adopters — and possibly signaling a shift in people’s preferences — two companies recently bet that the time is ripe for nudging a change in reading habits. So far, it’s too early to tell whether Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Digital Book will be considered a success at luring customers willing to try out a new paradigm; like many promising technologies before it, e-books have perpetually remained on the verge of taking off. But those hardware devices, and other efforts sure to come down the pipeline in the near future, echo a broader attempt by companies across the publishing world to apply the technology and economics of iTunes to the written word.

The textbook industry is no exception. Over the past year, a consortium of major textbook publishers and several competing ventures have been getting ready for a new push in what is becoming a small but steadily growing fraction of the overall market for college students. “Those efforts are starting to crack the surface of digital content being a serious growing enterprise in higher education,” said Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development and rights for Oxford University Press’s academic and U.S. divisions. McGraw-Hill Education, for example, offers almost 95 percent of its textbooks as e-books, and the publisher has seen a steady growth in interest over the past several years, albeit from a small base.

Their logic seems unassailable: With laptops now an ubiquitous presence on college campuses and textbook prices ever on the rise and suddenly a hot issue, technologically inclined students seem poised to change their study habits — and save a lot of money — by forgoing scribbles in the margin and trading in their highlighters for cursors.

“We’re not talking about a huge market at all at this point in time,” said Will Moore, the director of marketing for VitalSource Technologies, a company that works with publishers and academic institutions to deliver digital textbooks online. Actual numbers focusing on electronic books in the higher education sector are scarce. Still, he said, he projects “very rapid” growth in the future.

Large publishing companies have their own reasons for embracing the new technologies before an entire industry gets upended, but they’ll soon be competing with upstart ventures seeking to harness Facebook-style social networking to make e-textbooks widely available to the average student. Each effort represents a different approach to delivering what is now comfortably available in print via 1’s and 0’s, through computer screens and on portable readers.

In a September blog post titled “Is This It?”, Schnittman, of Oxford, described CaféScribe — a downloadable service that offers an iTunes-like interface for browsing books combined with social networking features allowing students, for example, to share notes online — as a potential “magic bullet solution” to students’ rejection, so far, of “every effort to get them to use electronic textbooks.”

It’s a conundrum that many in the industry still scratch their heads over. “The joke that I like to tell is that e-books in college have been 2 years away for 10 years, but I think ... if you ask people, ‘Will college students get their course content digitally?’ ... everyone says yes,” said Frank Lyman, the executive vice president for marketing at CourseSmart, a venture supported by six higher-education textbook publishers. “Why not now?”

The Social Networking Approach

Bryce Johnson dedicated a master’s thesis to the question. As a graduate student earning his MBA at the University of California at Berkeley several years ago, he explored why digital books hadn’t caught on as a viable medium. He “quickly realized that not a lot of people had really taken a plunge into universities,” he said.

What he found, after numerous focus groups and surveys, was that students weren’t interested in a flat interface that replicated what they already had between their textbook covers. “The predominant thing was, make it easy for me to highlight, take notes,” Johnson recounted.

So the outgrowth of his thesis, and then business plan, became CaféScribe, a company that launched to the general public in August. It uses a direct-to-consumer model in which users download a program that lets them browse, purchase and view books, and then annotate and share notes. Rather than working with bookstores or colleges, CaféScribe is relying more on word of mouth.

Its strategy from the start has been to address issues that students say keep them from considering digital books as a viable alternative. That hard-to-pinpoint feeling that keeps people attached to their books? Check. Starting in September, the company announced that it would send each customer a scratch-and-sniff sticker with the “musty book” smell.

Anticipating students’ learning styles, and possibly horrifying some professors, the interface links directly to Wikipedia articles. It allows readers to annotate and “highlight” text with different colors. Words can be searched as easily as a Google query, and skimming is easier with navigation tools. Students who prefer collaboration can even collect the notes of their online classmates and see them in one place.

“I think it’s very close to the tipping point, at least from the reads we’re getting from our students,” Johnson said.

Like iTunes, the model features a type of digital rights management that allows users to download individually purchased e-textbooks to three separate computers or laptops. But like Apple’s digital music service, the success of ventures like CaféScribe depend on the availability of content. Johnson estimated that the company would have some 15 publishers on board in the first quarter of 2008, including more content from Oxford. Still, he conceded, he receives hundreds of requests for titles each day. “Content is our biggest obstacle right now,” he said.

Still, Johnson sees a lot of growth at community colleges and from non-traditional students. Not necessarily right away, though: “It’s probably still a couple years out.” (Johnson hasn’t been making this prediction for 10 years; he received his MBA in 2004.)

The Publishers’ Approach

Lyman, of CourseSmart, has another theory about the market for electronic textbooks: There isn’t a critical mass of content in a widely available format. With that in mind, the venture — backed by publishers including Wiley, Pearson, Cengage Learning and McGraw-Hill — is an attempt to “jump-start” a market where it hasn’t arisen spontaneously.

For students, that means a Web-based repository for PDF-style versions of popular textbooks — although they’re only online and can’t be downloaded for offline reading. At the same time, Lyman said, the collaboration would allow professors to more easily review potential course materials online.

So far, the venture is still working out the best way to reach its customers. So, besides direct marketing, CourseSmart will start working with college bookstores and other retailers in an attempt to give students as many purchasing choices as possible. After all, in college, billing home to mom is an important payment option. And parents may approve of the savings: a 180-day online “subscription” to the ninth edition of Marketing, by Lamb, Hair and McDaniel, enough for a semester of work, sells for $80.99 on CourseSmart from a list price of $176.95 — over a 50-percent discount. (Used versions sell upwards of $91.99 on Amazon.)

Still, CourseSmart’s entry into the market has rankled the National Association of College Bookstores enough to cause it to look into potential antitrust issues raised by the consortium.

Individual publishers are also beginning to formulate their own strategies for electronic delivery. “We are starting to see ... interest by students in purchasing their ‘textbook content’ in an e-book form in lieu of the print book,” said Wendy Spiegel, the senior vice president for communications at Pearson Education. “We continue to see interest and growth.”

The publisher offers at least 800 titles in electronic format, with prices about half of what they’d be in print. Spiegel, recognizing their appeal, sees e-textbooks as an important part of the company’s overall strategy in the future.

Some have even considered the viability of portable readers as a potential way to deliver textbooks. “The development of Kindle validates our view that the development of digital content presents a major market opportunity for us. We are currently participating in a pilot program to evaluate the feasibility of higher ed titles being viewed via Kindle,” said Tom Stanton, the director of communications at McGraw-Hill Education, in an e-mail.

— Andy Guess

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Comments

Note-worthy

The Iliad e-book reader by Irex Technologies supports note taking, but it’s more expensive than its competitors. You pay for your frills.

Abbott Katz, at 7:25 am EST on January 3, 2008

Free Textbooks

The problem isn’t that students reject e-textbooks, it’s that the textbook companies are charging too much. For example, $80.99 for an ebook of a textbook that sells for $176.95 new isn’t a great deal if you can buy a used copy for $91.99 and then sell it back for $20-$45. What we need is a new system for writing textbooks, where professors get grants and get tenure for writing textbooks that are available online for free. This would have the added benefit of enormous foreign aid, like the efforts of the Global Text Project (globaltextproject.blogspot.com).

John K. Wilson, collegefreedom.org, at 8:15 am EST on January 3, 2008

Bookstores!

Do a REAL analysis of the textbook market as the Textbook and Academic Authors Association (TAAA) has done. You will see that bookstores are the primary culprits here. Seriously. Look at how much they charge for used copies! The author and publisher make the money on the 1st edition only. With most texts not going into a revision for several years, that’s several years of gross profits for the campus bookstores. I’m all for e-textbooks but I’m also for a real assessment of who is making money. By the way, watch the bookstores growl once the e-books come along. They will be losing money, too.

ANTHONY, at 8:35 am EST on January 3, 2008

e-textbook pricing and options

John,

$80.99 might not be the absolute best deal, but it’s still attractive. If one buys a used book for $91.99 at Amazon (and then adds in the shipping costs, bringing the price closer to $100.00), a $20 buy back is close to the $80.99 price. A few bucks might be saved, but then there’s the wait for the book to arrive. And there’s no guarantee that the print book will find a used market.

If students *really* want to save money on print books, they’ll buy and sell direct to one another and will cut out the bookstore and its mark up on used books.

E Textbooks are an option. They might not be the option everyone chooses — some will prefer print for print’s sake; others because they think it’s worth the effort to go with print because they might save even more money if they can resell the used print book back to a store or direct to another student. Some will want the ebook,however. They’ll want a clean text uncluttered by prior users’ notes, doodles, highlights, and coffee stains. They’ll want a book that comes instantly and is on a device they’re already carrying anyway. They’ll want something that links to the Web or to tutorials or to exercises or that includes multimedia.

If they do, then half the price —roughly— of a new print book is a good option.

Maybe not perfect in terms of getting the content for the absolute lowest price, but still good.

Nick Carbone, Director of New Media at Bedford/St. Martin’s, at 9:00 am EST on January 3, 2008

When I was in graduate school, we used Blackboard and a lot of the articles were scanned and posted for us to read. The price came in when I printed them out. I spend enough money on buying printer cartridges that I would have been better off either buying books or a course packet. I don’t think most students understand that all of this is merely shifting the cost to another area.

A, at 10:05 am EST on January 3, 2008

Half price seems reasonable for e-books though I suspect it could be a little lower than that and still provide some income for the publisher and a small royalty for the author at least for books that sell pretty well. With e-publishing for all practical purposes, the costs are all on the front end with the exception of any advertising/promotion. It seems to me much of that could (probably is being) done via the Internet again saving a significant amount of money.

I just finished my first book and the copy editing and typesetting costs totaled about $6,000 or $7,000 for a ~ 200 page textbook. Both were farmed out by the small publisher and were excellent particularly the freelance copyeditor.

Like John, I would like to see textbooks available on line for free but there are some costs involved beyond just the effort of the author. Most of us don’t write well enough not to require at least some copy editing nor are meticulous enough to get the references perfect without someone to check them. Typesetting is probably optional but again if at least a few thousand copies of a book are sold, the cost per copy is minimal and there is a real aesthetic value. There are also some costs in publishing, e.g., organizing the whole process, vetting book proposals, possibly including peer-review though again I don’t think they need to be terribly high if done efficiently.

In short, there are going to be costs beyond the work of the author. I’m no expert but I suspect the cost could be limited to around $10,000 for publishing a typical e-textbook. The beauty of it is that with electronic distribution it is a fixed cost and if 10,000 copies are distributed, the cost per copy is only $1.00 for whomever is footing the bill.

Anonymous, at 10:50 am EST on January 3, 2008

Anthony, publishers increase the prices of their textbooks each year whether or not the book has changed editions. If a textbook has been sitting in the publisher’s warehouse for a year, it will still cost the bookstore more each semester. Bookstores take the same markup each time they purchase a title but their cost increases. It is not the bookstores or the used book companies that drive up or control textbook costs.

Terri, Director, at 11:35 am EST on January 3, 2008

E-Textbooks

All seem to have a valid point. It may remind some of John Godfrey’s Saxe’s fable of “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” Everyone sees their piece of the pie.

Still the talk is about price, a book, and a consumer (student). We are still talking about things and what they cost instead of their size and what they weigh (:-) and programs or learning communities (which is what you have in a classroom) and what or HOW they can further that learning or teaching experience (facilitator/coaching if you don’t take the “sage on stage” model of education)).

In this respect, e-books should take into HOW a teacher presents content in class, perhaps the teacher him/herself, the dynamism of what media can offer, and other variables such as assessment and testing (students still care about grades), grade feedback, asking questions, intuitive inter-activity, and the like. If a student has to learn HOW to use an e-book, or spend more money on a “reader” that seems to defeat part of the initial attraction. So it’s more than e-books per se and students reluctance to use them (may don’t even use a printed book except to study before an exam at the last minute) but what can be done to make the educational experience more dynamic and rewarding in a new media. IF it were about cost alone, then here is a radical thought, why not have tuition cover the costs of learning resources?

George Duda, Vice President, Publishing Solutions at GLC, at 11:40 am EST on January 3, 2008

E-books

Pricing of all types of books is out of professors’ control, largely, anyway.

USABILITY is the real issue. The one I adopted 2 summer ago was just a glorified pdf file that had so much protection on it it couldn’t be used on more than one computer (try referring to text materials in class...) It’s either print it out at the cost of a toner cartridge, or what? There just is no advantage.

I also used an online text from Atomic Dog once. That worked out better, but then a major bought out the company and no one answered the phones anymore — a business move to kill a good idea that threatened an old model?

Scott Roberts, Associate Dean — School of Management & Business, at 1:10 pm EST on January 3, 2008

e-texts

E-texts could be a great support for students with disabilities who need alternate format for their textbooks. However, the way things are now e-texts are generally in formats that are not accessible for students who use screen-reading software such as JAWS software used by students with blindness. PDF files, unedited digital formats continue to pose problems for students who need alternative to print for their textbooks. When we do move to e-texts let’s make sure these students are included by making sure e-texts use Universal Design concepts that provide access for all.

Ann Satkowiak, Director, Services for Students with Disabilities at Pellissippi State Technical Community College, at 11:25 am EST on January 4, 2008

favors e-books with caution

I am in favor of the electronic book movement, but we must be careful. (1) Competing book reader implementation makes sense. Competing book formats would be a mistake. [We don’t need to spend decades on committees for standards review either.] Anyone can read any paper book. Why should electronic books be any different. (2) I still use a paper book that has fallen from the roof of my car and been completely under water. Do that with an e-book reader and its content. (3) Readers have been writing in margins since paper books were invented. Don’t down play the need for this technology. (4) We continue to find paper (sic) writings from the dawn of history, and we can read them. How will we read our e-books 2000 years from now? Will we be able to read them 5, 50, etc years from now? [See “Preserving Electronic Documents” by Douglas A. Kranch, kranch.1@osu.edu , http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway....p;type=pdf&coll=GUIDE&dl=ACM] I also use books from the olde days as classroom show and tell [my IT career began in the late 60’s]. This is an added reason to value long term viability of any e-book content. (5) Someone gets credit for calling things “books” in the first place. Let’s avoid battles over trademark of “e-book” and its variants. When it comes to the cost of books vs. the cost of e-books. The real question seems to be the value of the content vs. the value of its package. When I buy a paper book, I expect to pay more for embossed leather with gilt edge pages, etc than for a drug store paperback. The music industry has a similar struggle with the price of download songs vs. traditional retail album packages (CD or LP). What is the value of the content? What is reasonable compensation for creation of that content? What are available methods to amortize that compensation over the retail and archival life of that content? Respectfully,~~~ Dan 0;-D

Daniel M. St.Andre, MS, at 4:30 pm EST on January 4, 2008

Free Textbooks, Available Now

How about textbooks, whose content is made available for free by authors, with very generous terms for copying and distribution?

Available now: see examples off of http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html

Robert Beezer, Professor at Univ of Puget Sound, at 4:30 pm EST on January 4, 2008

It is fact that the college bookstore’s make 11 cents on the dollar for books (www.nacs.org) If you really want to make a statement, talk to the publishers and authors. They request a new edition every few years because the author only makes money on the first printing of a new edition. After that, the market is saturated with used books. I am really tired of people blaming the bookstore’s when all they are trying to do is offer as many used books as possible. Independent college bookstores pay their own salaries, lights, etc. Those “ripoffs” don’t use any appropriated state funds therefore leaving more money in the state allocation for the students and campus services. Bottom line—-your education is an investment into your future. If you stopped purchasing your frilly coffee drinks and got off your cell phones, those books would become surprisingly affordable.

D.M., at 4:30 pm EST on January 4, 2008

Wikipedia? I don’t think so.

I was actually relatively persuaded that e-textbooks might be a good choice, including for a class that I’m teaching soon, until I hit the part about links to Wikipedia. Why would any professor want to promote, even indirectly, a site filled with misinformation? Publishers, if you want my vote, find more credible resources and links. Then we’ll talk.

In reference to D.M., I went through four years of college and several years of graduate school without a cell phone or buying any of those “frilly drinks.” I worked three part-time jobs as an undergraduate and barely could put food on the table as a graduate student on a teaching assistantship. I guarantee that forking out $400-500 a semester for books (as a grad. student in the mid-1990s forward) put a huge dent in my minimal budget.

There needs to be a middle ground between the profit-gouging that is happening in selling these books. As a writer, I want to see a reasonable profit for everyone, but it doesn’t justify the outrageous prices that campus bookstores charge students, particularly through re-sales.

English Prof., at 6:20 pm EST on January 4, 2008

In response to English Prof: Yes, as a grad student I also worked 50+ hours a week while attending classes full time as a single parent and never once did I complain about the prices of books.... it was what it was. The comment I made about “frilly coffee drinks” and cells phones was not flippant. This is something I experience daily. Being in the college bookstore industry for 15 years I interact with students who are holding their coffee drink in one freshly manicured hand while talking on their cell phone with the other hand complaining to the unfortunate soul on the other end how expensive their books are. All I’m saying is that, instead of readily blaming the bookstore, (because it’s easier than actually researching the true cause of the pricing)accept the fact that inflation is a reality....with everything. What students don’t understand is that when bookstores buy back and sell used books any books left over are returned with a restocking fee to the distributors or, worse yet, the bookstore has to write them off. How bad can it be when a student buys a book for $100 and gets $50 back at the end of the semester? The only time a student doesn’t get money back is if their instructor doesn’t want to use that book again or the publishers make the decision to change the edition. The bookstore doesn’t want to change book editions (contrary to popular belief) because it is a huge administrative expense. I think students need to understand that they need to make sacrifices and also need to ask themselves “How bad do I really want an education"?

D.M., at 11:10 am EST on January 11, 2008

I AGREE

I agree with D.M. I know for a fact that there is no profit gouging at least from the bookstores. D.M. is correct when they state that the bookstores make 11 cents on the dollar profit on a $1 sale. So who’s making this elusive profit? Textbooks are not printed like mass market books; they are specialized materials that take longer to print with fewer copies run than mass market books.

Publishers that talk poor faculty members into choosing this wonderful bundle packed textbook that is nothing more than a plot to get them to change books. Then the bookstores are forced to change books (expense), return the old books if they can (expense), pay for shipping those books back (expense) and have to listen to the students complain that the bookstores rip them off.

Did you know that approximately 75% of the price of a book goes to pay publishers and royalties to authors? I’m not saying they don’t deserve to be paid but lets get the facts straight.....the price starts out high as soon as it leaves the publisher’s hands. Just my 2 cents.....

James T., at 8:25 pm EST on January 11, 2008

between a rock and a hard place

The current bookstore environment is bad and will get worse. The 32% margin made on used books is drying up as smart students hear from friends about selling the book on amazon or ebay for 4-5 times what a bookstore would give them. Publishers have a vested interest in making the transition to ebooks a reality to avoid working with vendors who gladly sell used books.

Students are voting for selling their books online in droves. The days of the college bookstore are numbered. Let’s hope they can make it on clothing, supplies and candy sales.

Scooby, at 7:00 pm EST on January 20, 2008

Portables and Text Readers E-Text Tools

Timely article..with informative comments. With respect to students with disabilities, check the law called NIMAS; which is a standard digital format for e-text. This law will require schools to have tools such as text-readers on hand. We use the ClassMate Reader, Start-to-Finish audio books and a program called SOLO to help students with disabilities improve their literacy skills. You can do almost everything you can with regular books, except “smell” them.

valc, at 7:55 am EST on January 21, 2008

I’ve never tried digital textbooks I usually buy them from a price comparison site like www.cheapesttextbooks.com

Melanie, at 4:10 pm EST on February 28, 2008

You can get ebooks and read them on laptop already, but the breakthrough here is the use of the Kindle, which makes it a much more pleasant read. Some people hate reading off the screen. This is the future.I only hope that publishing companied won’t jack up the prices for the digital books.

EssayWriter, Vance Refrigiration, at 5:05 am EDT on August 27, 2008

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