Tom Simpson, who works at San Diego State University’s bookstore, may not condone some of the tactics students use to get around the exorbitant prices of textbooks, but he’s certainly sympathetic to their plight. He says so in a “Soapbox” guest editorial in Publishers Weekly. What inspired him was a recent sale he made to a student: two books for $325.

“This year,” he writes, “the college bookstore where I work has its first books priced north of $200. That price tag is painful in any year, but when people are hurting, it’s a travesty.”

Textbook prices have made a lot of headlines recently, highlighted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to push his state’s school system into e-textbooks. (Read Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.)

Is Simpson’s store selling e-textbooks? “Digital books have also seen an uptick in sales,” he says. “This semester we have 265 titles available in electronic editions, and with prices reduced to around 40% or 50% off the new hardcover price, an increasing number of students are willing to download a book or read it online.”

Students will do just about anything to hold down the cost of books, including buying used books and international editions, borrowing, sharing and renting. But when all legitimate approaches have been exhausted, there is always stealing. “Cheap is nice,” says Simpson wistfully “but free is better.”

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

For over a decade we’ve longed to hear that the day of the digital textbook had arrived, and last month we announced, “That day appears to have come.” (Pub Industry Braces for Schwarzeneggrification of Textbooks)

Did we put an asterisk next to that announcement? If not, we should have. Randall Stross, in the New York Times, reminds us that not every screen is suitable for textbook reading, especially for math and science texts, the very kind that California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has been pressing his state’s school system to adopt.

Other states, and just about everyone in the $5.5 billion textbook publishing industry, are watching the experiment to see if it’s going to fly. There’s no doubt that it is. It just may not fly on the iPhone, writes Stross in the Times’s Digital Domain column. “The iPhone has a grand total of six square inches of display. In my opinion, no amount of ingenuity will enable textbooks to squeeze into a credit-card-size space.” Stross contrasts iPhone’s screen to the 155 square inches of the two-page spread in a typical textbook, then details some of the problems with a San Mateo software company called CourseSmart:

The iPhone app from CourseSmart does not reformat the print textbook’s contents for display on a small screen. Instead, it uses a PDF image of each page, as does the browser-based version of its eTextbook. All of the charts, graphs and design elements are intact, but everything — including the text — is indecipherably small without zooming in. Enlarging the text to legible size introduces the need to scroll left and right for each line, which quickly grows tedious.

PDFs on a tiny screen are not what the e-book industry’s founding mothers and fathers had in mind when they envisioned a reading device in the backpack of every student. The essence of e-text is reflow-ability. Graphs, charts, formulas and other fundamental textbook features must literally be able to go with the flow. If you can’t read all of a formula on the screen, or if a graph is on one page and you can’t match it instantly to the text, or if back-and-forthing between pages means a wait of ten or fifteen seconds, a textbook is close to useless, maybe worse than useless.

Whenever we referred to educational applications we always had in mind a dedicated reading device of laptop or tablet size and functionality. See for instance our analysis of developments in this area, Kindle Sequel on the Way, But Will It Play on Campus? Stross’s article only reinforces our rock-solid certainty that the key to e-textbooks is the tablet, and you’ll never see an asterisk next to that declaration.

Here’s Stross’s article in full: Texting? No, Just Trying to Read Chapter 6

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

About ten years ago as the digital book revolution got under way in earnest, the industry’s pioneers agreed that e-books would take off only when a generation of students had matured and begun demanding its content online.

That day appears to have come. With textbook prices tripling since 1986 and rising at twice the national inflation rate, students are looking at school books the way they looked at music CDs – if there’s a cheap or free way to get their hands on them, they will.

“Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet,” writes Tamar Lewin of the New York Times, “but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.”

That will come as welcome news to many of the nation’s 17 million students. Both the cost and the weight of book-laden backpacks can be crippling.

But for publishers of textbooks and college bookstores it will feel as if the Death Star has just launched a doomsday weapon. Textbooks are a $5.5 billion industry, representing about 25% of the entire US book market. According to the National Association of College Stores, in 2007-08, students spent an average of $488 on new and used course materials in the college store or its online equivalent. The average price of a new textbook in 2008 was $57, and for a used one, $49. Some textbooks cost over $100 and the total book fees at some schools can exceed $1000 a year.

The loss of a good chunk of that revenue is going to put a big hurt on all who make a living from textbooks (and let’s not forget the authors!). Nevertheless, that seems to be the way the world is going. “In five years,” says the superintendent of one county serving half a million students, “I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks”

Though publishers are repurposing their textbook content for online delivery, the pressure by colleges to hold costs down will make digitally delivered content far less profitable than books packaged in hard covers.

The state leading the charge to take textbooks digital is California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who balked at the cost and half-joked that the weight of printed textbooks was daunting even for him, an international bodybuilding champion. His initiative is to replace high school math and science textbooks with open source digital versions, which are free thanks to the efforts of CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit group. CK-12 has adapted textbooks to meet state education standards.

“With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” writes Lewin in In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History. If the experiment is successful, what happens in California is not going to stay in California.

Cengage Learning, however, is trying another approach: renting textbooks. It will rent them for 40% to 70% off list price for as little as two months and as long as 130 days, according to another article by Lewin. When the rental ends, students have a choice of returning the books or buying them.

One of the benefits of Cengage’s business model is author compensation. “’Our authors will get royalties on second and third rentals, just as they would on a first sale,’” Lewin quotes Cengage’s CEO. In the traditional model, textbook authors never receive royalties on resales.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

There’s some followup news of note on our story of last week, Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

After Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger complained about the cost of print textbooks, which is adding to his state’s astronomical budget deficit, and joked about using heavy print editions to build muscles, international media giant Pearson took him up on his call for a e-book substitutes in science and math. Pearson is a world leader in education, business information and consumer publishing (they own Penguin Books, for example).

Craig Morgan Teicher of Publishers Weekly reports that Peter Cohen, Pearson’s CEO of North America school curriculum business, stated,“We believe it is important to take these forward steps toward an online delivery system and we are supporting the Governor’s initiative, recognizing there are numerous challenges ahead for the education community to work through.”

The changeover will not be achieved with a snap of the fingers. The California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative spells out a number of the challenges that Pearson’s Cohen alludes to.

The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) is responsible for reviewing these materials to verify that they are aligned to the California content standards. Qualifying mathematics courses include geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, or calculus. The science materials must be aligned to the standards for physics, chemistry, biology/life sciences, or earth sciences, including the investigation and experimentation strand. Digital textbooks should approach or equal a full course of study and must be downloadable.

Above is a photo of the Governor before his state’s financial woes bowed his shoulders.

RC

There’s nothing like a celebrity endorsement to boost a product, and e-books could not ask for a more renowned patron than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though he stands at the pinnacle of fame as governor of California, it doesn’t take much to make him revert to his identity as The Terminator. In this case the things he wants to terminate are textbooks. After hefting a few, Schwarzenegger, arguably the greatest bodybuilder of all time, joked “I can use these for curls.”

But it isn’t the books’ weight that daunts him; it’s their cost. Waging a fight to the death to extirpate his state’s $24 billion budget deficit, he’s questioned whether printed textbooks are any longer viable, especially when schools buy revised and updated volumes every year or two. So, he’s now looking into taking California’s educational system digital.

Mark Tran, writing for the UK’s Guardian website, picked up on a statement of Schwarzenegger’s that appeared in a California newspaper:

“It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form. Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

Tran says the Guv wants to replace high school math and science books with e-book readers, which can hold all the schoolbooks students will ever need. And let’s not forget that updated and revised editions are simply one refresh away.

Read Arnold Schwarzenegger to scrap school textbooks in favour of ebooks.

RC

If you’ve been wondering, as I have, when the E-Book Revolution would find its way to textbooks, it’s now no further than your keyboard.

If any aspect of the book business were ripe for revolution it’s textbooks, because it’s closest to the music industry in terms of the SRI – the Student Resentment Index. College students have been complaining for decades about being compelled to pay preposterously high prices for school books of which they may be required to use only a few chapters. Though there is a secondary market for those books, publishers and authors have gotten around it by producing new editions, often merely cosmetically enhanced, and requiring students to buy them instead of used ones. The process is particularly cruel on families on a tight budget. And it’s not that hot on the spines of students lugging fifteen or twenty pounds of books in their backpacks.

The logical question is, “Why can’t we just download?”

Noam Cohen’s article in the New York Times, Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free discusses new approaches by students and parents who feel ripped off by a conspiracy of publishers, textbook authors, and colleges.

Recognizing the injustice, at least one denizen of academia, Professor R. Preston McAfee of Cal Tech, has forgone the traditional route and a big advance in order to deliver a free download of an economics textbook he has authored. The book is also for sale in an on-demand print edition, but for a fraction of the price that students would have to pay at their college bookstore. “This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” Cohen quotes Professor McAfee. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

Cohen cites other attractively priced approaches to Web delivery of math, science, economics and other big-ticket textbooks. These breakthroughs come along just as tablet-reader technology solutions accelerate. A tipping point may be closer than anyone (except a core group of wild-eyed visionaries like yours truly) could have imagined a few years ago.

– Richard Curtis