E-Textbooks: Lessons Learned From Northwest Missouri State University

[rgeorg]

Given over a decade of experience as a university tutor (to use the UK term for instructor), I second jgrays comments. I also hope that the soon-to-be-available Pixel Qi can address these screen needs. In addition - and also repeated from other threads - university and college courses tend to use some form of online course management system to deliver class materials (such as moodle) to enable electronic interaction within the class (forums or wikis), and for assignment uploading. This system is central to following the class and must also be available on the same platform that the student would also be carrying around to read/annotate textbooks.

I don't see how current "ereaders" can provide these functions given the refresh rate limitations of eink (never mind color). But netbooks do provide this and more, at the same price point or even less. Once the screen improves for reading (Pixel Qi) and the battery life goes to 6-8 hours - a typical school day - the netbook platform will be ideal for e-textbooks. One more comment: Prices of e-texts have to come down considering that the student cannot "resell" the text or purchase a used copy.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

The issue is clearly with the interactive needs of a student, which are different from your average reader. The existing readers are simply not optimized for student use. The study is still useful, however, because it gives a potential designer/manufacturer a list of items to hit in order to make a device optimized for student use. (Or, conversely, for a laptop or software manufacturer to target these same areas to make a better student computer, so a dedicated device is not needed.)

[Crowl]

While the lack of good random access is obviously a significant drawback for textbooks, there is something to be said for the convenience of being able to carry around all your textbooks in one small device and maybe the approach they should look to take is to include the ebook for a small premium when you buy the paper version.

[junkyardwillie]

Originally Posted by Crowl

While the lack of good random access is obviously a significant drawback for textbooks, there is something to be said for the convenience of being able to carry around all your textbooks in one small device and maybe the approach they should look to take is to include the ebook for a small premium when you buy the paper version.

I think that option is far more likely a scenario than offering the e-textbooks at a discount from the paperbacks. Younger people would be far more likely to jump to e-textbooks if they had a 50% discount to paperbacks so its not likely to make sense from the publishers bottom line standpoint. Also if you think of it from a publishers perspective, you have a captive audience, students have to buy the books for their classes or fail so what is the ultimate motivation to sell your books cheaper? Will students buy 2 books because they are so cheap now, not likely unless they click the buy button twice by accident.

I still think the manufacturing aspect of creating a book is probably one of the cheapest costs per book because the same factory runs so many books through, the real cost are the back office type of costs and the salaries of the people that are distributing these things and those people don't want to take a pay cut so you can have a cheaper textbook, especially if they don't have to. It'll be an interesting thing to watch because scanning books is getting easier and easier, when the devices (Pixel Qi) are able to provide a better studying experience I suspect many students will find their own ways to get digital copies of their textbooks for a "reasonable" price if publishers don't establish a market early.

[sassanik]

I think that most text book publishers are probably not really excited about ebooks. Currently they do have a captive audience and they come out with new editions and stop printing old ones forcing students to buy new editions and not the cheaper older ones that are used.

Once the book is in an electronic copy, its public, out there. If the publishers are still wanting to jerk around their students with high prices and new editions all the time they are going to run into piracy problems.

I could be wrong and maybe they will slow down the new edition thing, but I feel that text book publishers have been being greedy.

I wonder how the ebook readers worked out in the literature classes? It seems to me that would be one of the first area's to adopt ebooks.

I do agree that they need some way of book marking pages, and an easy way to go from the index to specific chapters. Teachers will probably need to stop using page numbers as much, as what font style and size you are using can significantly change the amount of pages in a book.

It is good that schools are taking these steps to try and figure things out in regards to the new technology.

Amy

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

The switch from printed books to e-books is obviously going to be an expensive, disruptive and possibly profit-sapping process, which only makes current publishers extremely reluctant to change: If you were a publisher, would you willingly go through the extra work of creating an e-book that you could only sell if your printed book had to be cut to 50% of its price? Heck, no.

It's possible that what America needs (and what, thanks to the digital age, it is finally feasible to have) is a central, nationally-used, nationally-supported academic publisher for all schools.

So a national agency, under the wing of (or supported by) the Dept of Education, might be required. This tax-supported agency would produce educational texts that corresponded to the educational standards of the country, produced in e-texts that would be provided at no additional cost to all students when tuition was paid (or perhaps even available at no additional cost to all Americans).

There could still be traditional ed publishers, producing printed texts (or specialized e-texts) for those schools that sought a higher standard than the national one, and whose students were willing to pay higher fees for the privilege. But the new standard would be nationally-standardized free e-texts (read on student-optimized readers or laptops), provided by taxes, and used by most schools in the nation.

[junkyardwillie]

Originally Posted by Steve Jordan

The switch from printed books to e-books is obviously going to be an expensive, disruptive and possibly profit-sapping process, which only makes current publishers extremely reluctant to change: If you were a publisher, would you willingly go through the extra work of creating an e-book that you could only sell if your printed book had to be cut to 50% of its price? Heck, no.

It's possible that what America needs (and what, thanks to the digital age, it is finally feasible to have) is a central, nationally-used, nationally-supported academic publisher for all schools.

So a national agency, under the wing of (or supported by) the Dept of Education, might be required. This tax-supported agency would produce educational texts that corresponded to the educational standards of the country, produced in e-texts that would be provided at no additional cost to all students when tuition was paid (or perhaps even available at no additional cost to all Americans).

There could still be traditional ed publishers, producing printed texts (or specialized e-texts) for those schools that sought a higher standard than the national one, and whose students were willing to pay higher fees for the privilege. But the new standard would be nationally-standardized free e-texts (read on student-optimized readers or laptops), provided by taxes, and used by most schools in the nation.

I'm all for that as long as my taxes don't get raised, I'd vote that bill right down if its coming out of my pocket. I paid my dues in college, I'm not paying someone elses now as well

What would be a fairer way to organize it would be for the industry to restructure. It'd be better off for publishers to spin out their manufacturing divisions (if they have one still, I haven't looked into this) so their fixed costs related to the textbooks goes down. Now they would not need to worry about maintaining the cost of a factory so the cost of paper back books would be somewhat similar to ebooks (yes they need to pay the standalone manufacturing firms but they also need to pay scanner companies, the main difference should really be that there is a huge sunk cost in a factory). Now the manufacturing companies will be the hub for all publishers (there would likely be a few of them, maybe 2-3) and they would be able to take advantage of the increase in volume of books running through their factory and run more efficiency (i.e. lower costs to publishers). I think publishers would rather hide behind their "paperbacks cost more than ebooks" mantra than to do something like this because there is probably a big profit margin on textbooks that they don't want to lose either way.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by junkyardwillie

I'm all for that as long as my taxes don't get raised, I'd vote that bill right down if its coming out of my pocket. I paid my dues in college, I'm not paying someone elses now as well

You could look at it this way: Spreading the costs over the entire American tax base brings the cost per person waay down (a difference of pennies on your taxes)... but it could also result in a more educated and therefore more business-capable and prosperous country. Just a thought...

Originally Posted by junkyardwillie

What would be a fairer way to organize it would be for the industry to restructure. It'd be better off for publishers to spin out their manufacturing divisions (if they have one still, I haven't looked into this)...

In fact, most publishers contract out their jobs to the few large-scale book printers left, they don't largely "own their own printers." Though many printers may be making so much of their income directly off of publishers that the cancellation of their contract may essentially put them out of business.

At any rate, money formerly spent on paper milling, printing, storage and distribution can be reapplied to internal costs such as writing and editing. But it doesn't alter the fact that the publishers made a lot of money on paper book markups, which they will mostly lose when they shift to e-texts. They don't want to lose that profit, any more than you want to pay higher taxes. And when forced into the corner, they're just likely to declare bankruptcy and go home, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill for reparations anyway.

So either way, I expect we're the ones who will pay for it, whether we like it or not. Personally, I'd rather pay for an organization taking the country into the future, rather than for an organization that skipped out and stuck me with the bills.

Sure, no one wants to pay more taxes. But if a few pennies in taxes means a better country for everyone, I'll skip a beer or two for the team.