Textbooks’ Digital Future
何安然立冬节气养生E-books may be replacing hardbound versions in college classrooms.鼻饲病人营养流食食谱
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Harold Elder is not your typical Apple fanboy. Yet the 58-year-old University of Alabama economics professor pre-ordered an iPad to make sure he had one of the first ones. The device is “something that I’ve been waiting for for years,” he says. And not, to be clear, merely for reasons of gadget lust. “It really has the possibility of making the learning experience much richer,” says Elder, who is considering testing a new iPad-ready digital textbook in his introductory microeconomics cour in the fall of 2010.
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“Richer” is certainly the right word to u. App developers 全国最大的成人aren’t the only ones who greeted the iPad’s relea with gratitude and optimism. The textbook industry, too, es it as a way to woo customers away from the ud-book market, boost profits, and help students learn better. It’s a pivotal moment for a gment of the publishing industry that has stubbornly resisted change. Thanks in large part to the iPad and an expected rush of competitor slates, that resistance is crumbling.
Of cour, it won’t happen overnight. Textbooks today are still bought and sold in much the same way they’ve always been: as ink-and-paper objects assigned by professors and purchad by students in campus bookstores. “It’s a slow-moving pharmaceutical market,” says Matt MacInnis, the CEO of Inkling, a startup working on digital textbooks. “The professor writes a prescription, and the student goes to fill it.” It may be slow-moving, but it’s highly profitable. While McGraw-Hill Education’s earnings fell by 14 percent in 2009 becau of the recession, college textbook sales actually incread.
But just ask any journalist or musician: technology has a way of laying siege to comfortable industries. And the iPad may be the first of many barbarians at the gate. Apple sold 3 million of the devices in its first three months, and now competitors, reportedly including Google, Hewlett-Packard, and Amazon, are preparing rivals. Educators and students are enthusiastic about them; at least three colleges, including the Illinois Institute of Technology, will offer free iPads to incoming students. But what will they put on them besides Bejeweled and Facebook?
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There are already digital textbooks available, and their numbers are expected to grow: according to Simba Information, which provides data and rearch on the media industry, they reprent less than 2 percent of textbook sales today, but will reach 10 percent by 2012. But in 2010 the offerings were pretty meager. CourSmart, a San Mateo, Calif., company collectively owned by five of the biggest textbook publishers, has 6,000 educational titles for sale in digital format. But its electronic books are little more than scanned versions of printed works. A CourSmart e-book includes some neat functions, like arch capability and digital note-taking, but for the most part, it has few advantages
over a traditional textbook other than weight and price. (CourSmart books usually cost less than half the price of a new printed book.)
小型微利企业所得税优惠政策That’s where a company like Inkling comes in. Inkling, a 20-person San Francisco startup, and its competitors—including New York City’s ScrollMotion—are working with the textbook publishers to bring their books onto the iPad, iPhone, and other future devices. The aim, says Inkling’s MacInnis, is to harness all the advantages of a multitouch, Web-enabled slate. That means chemistry students won’t just e an illustration of a benzene molecule; they’ll spin and rotate a three-dimensional model of one. Biology students won’t just read about the cardiovascular system; they’ll e video of a beating heart, narrated by a world-class heart surgeon.
Interactivity, though, is only part of the story. Bringing texts onto a digital platform provides an opportunity to make the book as social as the classroom. With Inkling’s technology, for instance, a student can choo to follow another’s “note stream,” or view a heat map of the class’s most-highlighted passages. Professors get real-time informatio
n on how much of the reading assignment the class actually did, or whether a particular review problem is tripping up large numbers of students. All that comes on top of the cost savings: even the advanced digital textbooks will cost less than their print equivalents (with most of them in the $99 range) and some will even come “unbundled,” allowing students to buy the individual chapters they need most for a small fraction of the cost of a full textbook.
Textbook publishers stand to lo some revenue if individual chapter purchas catch on, but they hope to more than offt the loss by attracting new customers. Big publishers like McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Cengage are locked in a longstanding battle against the ud-textbook market, which now totals about $2.2 billion, according to Simba, and from which they earn no revenue. Online textbook-rental companies offer lower prices than the publishers, and reach a wide customer ba. But traditional publishers think technology will be their salvation. There’s no such thing as a “ud” e-book, and digital textbooks are the center of a whole ecosystem of rvices—such as homework-management systems and video-capture technology for recording lectures—t
大江东去阿耐hat publishers hope will be profitable. “We’re becoming a software rvice company instead of a textbook company,” says Peter Davis, president of McGraw-Hill Education.
