As students prepare to go back to school for the fall, it’s a sure bet that none of them is looking forward to the ritual hassle of buying and then having to lug around textbooks. A recent study showed that a quarter of all college students carry more than 20 pounds of textbooks every day.
So in an era of exploding sales for ebook readers and tablets like the iPad, why aren’t more students saving some bucks and themselves from chronic back pain? It’s not so simple.
The U.S. higher education textbook market is estimated to be worth about $9 billion, but only about 2 percent of that is made up of digital textbook sales. When it comes to digital transformations, “every industry has changed in the last 10 years except for education,” said Ousama Haffar, vice president of marketing for Kno, a textbook application for the iPad that launched in June. “It blows our mind that technology has accelerated so many industries but education has fallen behind.”
Part of the holdup is that only 6 to 8 percent of students use tablets, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen. Yet students who own tablets say they want to be able to use them for their textbooks. What’s more, seven in 10 students say they have foregone buying textbooks because they are too expensive, according to a recent study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization.
A Pearson Foundation study found that of the students it surveyed, 70 percent want to own a tablet, and 15 percent said they planned to buy one in the next six months.
As students buy more tablets and the technology improves to allow better note-taking and skimming in ebooks, the market is certain to get much bigger, with greater competition. In addition to Kno, there’s Inkling, a startup that’s helping academic publishers recreate their books for the iPad, as well as more established e-book companies like CourseSmart and Amazon, which recently announced a rental plan for textbooks.
For publishers, one hurdle is the fact that the costs of creating digital titles are higher than those for producing print books. Even though the unit costs of paper and ink go down, the cost of creating an interactive text is higher than a static one, just as the cost of producing a novel is lower than what it takes to make a movie. Publishers are also now dependent on third parties like Inkling or Amazon to distribute their content, and they take a cut.
“Institutions are going to be demanding the use of these devices,” said Matt MacInnis, the CEO of Inkling. “When that happens, no one is going to buy a [printed] book. That’s where the dramatic shift occurs.”
The shift to digital will also help publishers because it may mean less competition from the booming secondary market of used book sales. “The real benefit financially to the publisher is about the lack of secondhand titles in the market after the fact,” MacInnis said. “You can’t resell a digital copy. This is what will eventually drive costs down. The more people who use digital, the lower the prices will become over the next few years.”
Right now, prices are still steep across all forms of textbooks. The average cost of a physical book is about $60, while a digital book is usually priced closer to $31, according to data compiled from major booksellers, Amazon, Chegg and Half.com. The price of renting a digital book, about $31 in some cases, is in the ballpark of buying a physical book secondhand, at about $35.
Electronic textbook companies are placing their bets in different ways. Amazon and Kno are converting physical books to digital formats, while also adding interactive capabilities like the ability to highlight passages and make notes in the margins. Kno also has social media features like the ability to share notes with classmates or organize study dates.
“We’re not trying to reinvent publishing,” said Kno’s Haffar. “If you’re a student moving to digital for the first time, you want to make sure it’s like the book you’re using in class.”
For its part, Amazon launched Kindle textbook rentals in July, promising “tens of thousands of textbooks” at discounts of as much as 80 percent less than purchase price. Among the publishers offering rentals through Amazon are John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. Students can borrow a textbook for as little as 30 days or up to 360 days, with fees differing depending on how long the book is rented, Amazon said in a statement. Once the rental period for a textbook is up, students can choose to either purchase books or rent them again if needed, even if it’s just an extra day.
Inkling, which is working with McGraw-Hill and Pearson and has 35 titles in its catalog, is taking a different approach to the ebook. The company is interested in remaking, rather than replicating, the print book for the screen. They also don’t rent books, but will sell them by the chapter starting at $2.99 per chapter. “We believe that we’re at a shifting point in publishing where the digital product has to be better than the print book,” Inkling’s MacInnis said.
“Amazon wants to dominate textbooks,” he said, “but the technology it uses was developed to accommodate fiction. They’re shoehorning textbooks into a platform that was designed for something else.” Books developed with Inkling allow more only-on-the-iPad experiences, such as rendering chemical molecules in 3D or listening to musical compositions while reading about them.
“There tends to be an oversimplification of what this market is going to be,” MacInnis said. “Everyone has the notion of making a PDF out of the book, but it is a much more software-like market.”
MacInnis projects that digital textbooks won’t be a billion-dollar business until at least 2013. “So we’re focused on the long game.”
So in an era of exploding sales for ebook readers and tablets like the iPad, why aren’t more students saving some bucks and themselves from chronic back pain? It’s not so simple.
The U.S. higher education textbook market is estimated to be worth about $9 billion, but only about 2 percent of that is made up of digital textbook sales. When it comes to digital transformations, “every industry has changed in the last 10 years except for education,” said Ousama Haffar, vice president of marketing for Kno, a textbook application for the iPad that launched in June. “It blows our mind that technology has accelerated so many industries but education has fallen behind.”
Part of the holdup is that only 6 to 8 percent of students use tablets, according to a survey conducted by Nielsen. Yet students who own tablets say they want to be able to use them for their textbooks. What’s more, seven in 10 students say they have foregone buying textbooks because they are too expensive, according to a recent study by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit consumer-advocacy organization.
A Pearson Foundation study found that of the students it surveyed, 70 percent want to own a tablet, and 15 percent said they planned to buy one in the next six months.
As students buy more tablets and the technology improves to allow better note-taking and skimming in ebooks, the market is certain to get much bigger, with greater competition. In addition to Kno, there’s Inkling, a startup that’s helping academic publishers recreate their books for the iPad, as well as more established e-book companies like CourseSmart and Amazon, which recently announced a rental plan for textbooks.
For publishers, one hurdle is the fact that the costs of creating digital titles are higher than those for producing print books. Even though the unit costs of paper and ink go down, the cost of creating an interactive text is higher than a static one, just as the cost of producing a novel is lower than what it takes to make a movie. Publishers are also now dependent on third parties like Inkling or Amazon to distribute their content, and they take a cut.
“Institutions are going to be demanding the use of these devices,” said Matt MacInnis, the CEO of Inkling. “When that happens, no one is going to buy a [printed] book. That’s where the dramatic shift occurs.”
The shift to digital will also help publishers because it may mean less competition from the booming secondary market of used book sales. “The real benefit financially to the publisher is about the lack of secondhand titles in the market after the fact,” MacInnis said. “You can’t resell a digital copy. This is what will eventually drive costs down. The more people who use digital, the lower the prices will become over the next few years.”
Right now, prices are still steep across all forms of textbooks. The average cost of a physical book is about $60, while a digital book is usually priced closer to $31, according to data compiled from major booksellers, Amazon, Chegg and Half.com. The price of renting a digital book, about $31 in some cases, is in the ballpark of buying a physical book secondhand, at about $35.
Electronic textbook companies are placing their bets in different ways. Amazon and Kno are converting physical books to digital formats, while also adding interactive capabilities like the ability to highlight passages and make notes in the margins. Kno also has social media features like the ability to share notes with classmates or organize study dates.
“We’re not trying to reinvent publishing,” said Kno’s Haffar. “If you’re a student moving to digital for the first time, you want to make sure it’s like the book you’re using in class.”
For its part, Amazon launched Kindle textbook rentals in July, promising “tens of thousands of textbooks” at discounts of as much as 80 percent less than purchase price. Among the publishers offering rentals through Amazon are John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis. Students can borrow a textbook for as little as 30 days or up to 360 days, with fees differing depending on how long the book is rented, Amazon said in a statement. Once the rental period for a textbook is up, students can choose to either purchase books or rent them again if needed, even if it’s just an extra day.
Inkling, which is working with McGraw-Hill and Pearson and has 35 titles in its catalog, is taking a different approach to the ebook. The company is interested in remaking, rather than replicating, the print book for the screen. They also don’t rent books, but will sell them by the chapter starting at $2.99 per chapter. “We believe that we’re at a shifting point in publishing where the digital product has to be better than the print book,” Inkling’s MacInnis said.
“Amazon wants to dominate textbooks,” he said, “but the technology it uses was developed to accommodate fiction. They’re shoehorning textbooks into a platform that was designed for something else.” Books developed with Inkling allow more only-on-the-iPad experiences, such as rendering chemical molecules in 3D or listening to musical compositions while reading about them.
“There tends to be an oversimplification of what this market is going to be,” MacInnis said. “Everyone has the notion of making a PDF out of the book, but it is a much more software-like market.”
MacInnis projects that digital textbooks won’t be a billion-dollar business until at least 2013. “So we’re focused on the long game.”
