XplanaZine

About five years ago, e-books were all the rage. A number of companies saw the products as the “next big thing” (NBT) for software and publishing. The cost to publishers was approximately $50K per title and most figured you needed a library of at least 100 titles to get started. About $5 million later, everyone realized that the market wasn’t strong enough to support that type of investment, and the publishers turned to a lower-cost and lower-level technology. The dot-com-born e-book companies vanished as rapidly as they had appeared.

Fast forward five years, Suddenly enhanced e-books are getting ready to make the rounds again. Within the next eighteen months, we should see Web-based e-books from most publishers that:

• Have embedded media and interactivities that report to a gradebook via IMS-compliant XML;
• Are integrated with standards-compliant LCMS platforms;
• Are portable across multiple OS platforms and hardware technologies.

As interesting as the technology itself may be, equally fascinating is the impetus behind the renewed interest. First, consider the fact that publishers are facing increasing pressure from instructors and students regarding the prices of print textbooks.Publishers raise their prices every year (between 3-5%) to account for production costs and the increased media content that accompanies the textbooks, but it appears we are reaching a pricing saturation point. Some instructors are already looking for alternatives to traditional textbooks. For-profit universities like Phoenix University are using their centralized purchasing/bargaining power to drive down the prices they and their students must pay.

Publishers, on the other hand, are pinched by the rising costs of production and a used book market that eats into their revenue stream. In order to remain profitable, they must raise prices and introduce more first edition textbooks for which there can be no used book market.

It’s not hard to see that the existing system has severe limitations in terms of continued scalability. We will soon reach a price point at which users say, “Enough!” or “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore!” And yet, we (instructors and students) will continue to ask for more from the publishers (and at a better price).

Which is why e-books are beginning to make more sense than ever. This past week, Pearson released an announcement outlining a new e-book initiative that would offer popular textbooks at a discount of up to 50%. The announcement was certainly a “cover yourself” PR announcement to combat the negative publicity associated with rising textbook costs. But it was also something more.

Pearson’s announcement was also a gauntlet tossed into the increasingly fierce wars between publishers and campus bookstores. Searching for a way to avoid the “giant sucking sound” of used book sales, publishers have begun pushing more aggressively to market products directly to users. Eliminating the middleman, at least for them, is the best way to keep prices down. With print textbooks, this strategy only helps so much because books must still be stored in warehouses and then shipped to consumers.

E-books, however, could be the NBT as they are cheaper to store, essentially free to ship, and cost little to produce. For example, while a popular national textbook may cost $400K-$600K to publish and store, an e-book version of that same textbook can cost as little as $200 to produce (.pdf files for Adobe E-book Reader). Throw in some delivery technology and a little ecommerce and, voilâ, the popularity of e-books starts to make sense.

This is not to say, however, that e-books are a guaranteed success. Publishers have yet to prove themselves as capable marketers outside their known territory of “direct to professor” sales in which a sales representative convinces a professor to adopt a textbook for use in a course. Selling direct to consumer (especially students) is a radical approach for textbook publishers and we will have to wait and see how successful they can be.

Another issue is the technology used to create the e-books. Currently, most textbook publishers offer .pdf versions of their textbooks that can be purchased at a slight discount and viewed using Adobe’s E-book Reader. The technology is sound but uninspiring and does nothing to create the promised “integrated learning environment” that was touted when e-books first appeared. In order to deliver on that promise, and to create a stronger market, textbook publishers will need to integrate their products with LCMS platforms (so that students can link directly to pages they need to access without leaving the system) and provide their e-book products in formats more desirable to their end users (hint — students really do read information on their phones!).

Will the next-generation e-books make us want to give up our print textbooks? Of course not. But they will provide improved learning alternatives for those of us who teach online. And, just as important, they may help make our students’ education a bit more affordable.