Last week McGraw-Hill announced a new digital format for textbooks, which they named
McGraw-Hill Connect. You can read more about it in an article from the
Chronicles of Higher Education. This is not a good thing. While there has been a push in the fiction ebook market towards fewer formats, the number of formats for reference titles has been going up. The list now includes:
And that's just the places where I've _found_ reference titles. (I'm sure I missed at least one. In fact, I know I left out 2 that are so specialized you've probably never heard of them.) There are times that I wonder if the publishing industry is trying to set ebooks back another decade.
One thing that I know will be accomplished is that prices of digital textbook won't go down any time soon. Given that publishers have chosen to fragment their sales among multiple DRM systems, they won't see the cost savings that they would have had with only one format.
Adoption of digital textbooks is also being slowed by the multitude of formats. This has a range of causes from students simply not being able to find the book to resistance against supporting _another_ format. (That resistance does exist, and coping with it is the responsibility of the publisher, not the consumer.)