Textbook Renter Chegg Becomes More Social

NYTimes: "Chegg is known as the Netflix of college textbooks. The Silicon Valley start-up, which has raised more than $200 million in debt and equity, allows students to rent costly college textbooks, rather than buy them. When the semester is over, they ship the books back and order new ones. The business, said Dan Rosensweig, the former Yahoo and Activision Blizzard executive who became Chegg’s chief executive 13 months ago, is booming. He said Chegg, which plants a tree for every textbook rented, has planted four million trees."

Waterstone's Managing Director: Academic bookselling at "crisis point"

The Bookseller: "Waterstone's has called for academic publishers to 'significantly' increase their support for the chain, warning bricks and mortar academic bookselling could vanish from the high street within a few years. The retailer's m.d. Dominic Myers told delegates at the Bookseller Association’s annual Academic, Professional and Specialist Bookselling Group conference last week that the academic bookselling industry was at a “crisis point,” in which 2011 would be a defining year. ... "

B&N Pines for a Storybook Ending

WSJ: "It's never fun to realize, after starting a book, that the plot is so familiar it loses any element of surprise. The question for Barnes & Noble shareholders is whether they are living such a predictable tale. The stock's 47% plunge in the past three weeks, to below $10, its lowest point since the early 1990s, suggests investors feel that way. Last month's suspension of the dividend, to preserve cash for digital investments, likely sent income-oriented investors heading for the exits. But despite Barnes & Noble's claim to be 'now a growth company,' growth investors appear to be staying away—with good reason."

The chain gets smaller margin on eBooks than on physical books, the latter market shrinking as the former grows. It also has the brick-and-mortar monkey on its back, plus:

"It doesn't help that Barnes & Noble has taken on long-term debt for the first time in several years, partly to fund the $596 million cash buyout in 2009 of the Barnes & Noble college-store chain from Len Riggio, chairman and 30% shareholder. The price paid was more than Barnes & Noble's now-shrunken market capitalization. While the college chain's earnings have proved valuable as Barnes & Noble invests in digital, its sales at stores open more than a year have declined since the purchase. The deal would have looked better for Barnes & Noble shareholders if Mr. Riggio had taken stock rather than cash."

My late father-in-law Bill Bartkovick, a longtime Senior VP at B&N, founded the Barnes & Noble College Division. He would be the first to tell you that this division's days are numbered [see story below], and that the deal benefited Lenny and his family entirely at the expense of shareholders.

1 in 4 College Textbooks Will Be Digital By 2015

NYTimes: "Sales of digital textbooks still only account for a small fraction of the U.S. college market. But according to the latest report by the social learning platform Xplana, we have reached the tipping point for e-textbooks, and the company predicts that in the next five years digital textbook sales will surpass 25% of sales for the higher education and career education markets."

iPad as Textbook

Digits - WSJ: "For some classes at the University of Notre Dame, iPads are replacing textbooks — at least temporarily. The school is studying the use of the Apple Inc. tablet among students to see how it affects learning, and after a test this fall found that students students thought the device made their class more interesting. ... "

Kno Says Its New Tablet is the Answer for Students

Digits - WSJ: "Any startup going up against both Apple and Amazon.com is going to face tough questions. Kno thinks its unusual tablet computer answers them all. [The Silicon Valley company's] hardware ... is tailored for a specific purpose–letting students read and annotate electronic versions of textbooks. Among its distinguishing features is a larger screen than the iPad–nearly 14 inches diagonally, versus about 10 inches for Apple’s hit device–and the option to double that with a two-screen model that can be held vertically, like an open book. ... "

Campus Bookstore = Dinosaur?

The Chronicle of Higher Education: "As students cut costs by buying books from cheaper online retailers or by downloading e-textbooks, campus bookstores sell fewer and fewer textbooks. That's triggering an identity crisis for one of the oldest institutions on campus and leading some college officials to ask: If textbooks go digital, does the campus even need a bookstore?"

Textbook Rentals No Cure for Rising College Costs

Washington Post: "About half the nation's major college and university bookstores offered textbook rentals this fall, according to the National Association of College Stores, hoping to cut the $600-$900 students spend buying books each year. That's roughly a fivefold increase from around 300 stores a year ago. But schools and publishing experts say the programs are expensive to start up and difficult to operate. In addition, there are complaints that rental prices are still too high, even though they can be as much as half the cost of a new book. ..."

Oxford, Rice, Open University Release eBooks on iTunes U

Apple - CNET News: "Oxford University, The Open University, and Rice University are three of the first schools to release eBooks on Apple's iTunes U, the part of the iTunes Store dedicated to offering free educational content. The Open University has released 100 free, interactive eBooks and promises an additional 200 titles by the end of the year. The school said its eBooks aren't just digital versions of existing books, but rather books that are designed specifically for the electronic format. ... Oxford University joined the eBook release party as it pushed out Shakespeare's entire First Folio. Oxford's Shakespeare contribution is available free from iTunes U. ... Oxford said it is also making six plays by contemporaries of Shakespeare available, including "The Duchess of Malfi" by John Webster. Rice University released 18 of its most popular free textbooks available as part of its open education initiative, Connexions."

Behold, It Lives! Frankentext!

Flat World Knowledge co-founder Eric Frank:

There’s nothing like a dissatisfied market to create opportunity for new players and new models. Imagine, if you will, a cottage with a sign on the door in big letters that reads, “OPEN.” An Old Man in dark glasses, who looks suspiciously like Gene Hackman, motions Frankentext inside and offers him a bowl of hot soup. The Monster sits down and picks up a book. It seems like any other commercial textbook — professionally developed, peer-reviewed, and written by a renowned scholar. But something is different. Most startling, the book costs 80% less than a traditional textbook.

Frankentext looks inside. Instead of a copyright “All rights reserved” notice, he sees a funny symbol, “This work is licensed under a Creative Commons license.”

The Old Man explains:

“This is an open textbook, published by Flat World Knowledge, my son. It’s a new model that lets professors choose the book, and students choose the format and price. Flat World is not a publisher of online books. They are an open textbook publisher which automatically publishes books in multiple, low-cost formats. ... "

Publishers/Colleges Partner in New Digital Textbook Paradigm

The evolving market model described in this piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education makes complete sense, and will spell the death of organizations - such as Barnes & Noble's Wholesale/College Division (founded by my late father-in-law, by the way) - which have dominated the college text business for decades.

[Publishing] companies and college leaders are ... saying that e-textbooks should be required reading and that colleges should be the ones charging for them. It is the best way to control skyrocketing costs and may actually save the textbook industry from digital piracy, they claim. Major players like the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons are getting involved. ...

Here's the new plan: Colleges require students to pay a course-materials fee, which would be used to buy e-books for all of them (whatever text the professor recommends, just as in the old model).

Why electronic copies? Well, they're far cheaper to produce than printed texts, making a bulk purchase more feasible. By ordering books by the hundreds or thousands, colleges can negotiate a much better rate than students were able to get on their own, even for used books. And publishers could eliminate the used-book market and reduce incentives for students to illegally download copies as well. ...

An Indiana company called Courseload hopes to make the model more widespread, by serving as a broker for colleges willing to impose the requirement on students. And it is not alone. The upstart publisher Flat World Knowledge recently made a bulk deal with Virginia State University's business school, and last month the company hired a new salesperson devoted entirely to "institutional sales" of its e-textbooks. And Daytona State College, in Florida, is negotiating with publishers to test a similar arrangement. ...

McGraw-Hill's New Custom Publishing Platform: Create

Press release via The Digital Reader: "McGraw-Hill Education has brought custom publishing into the 21st century with McGraw-Hill Create (www.mcgrawhillcreate.com), an innovative platform that gives instructors unprecedented control over and customization of higher education classroom content. Gone are the days when professors had no choice in how to assemble content for classroom instruction, or had to wait weeks to receive a customized text. With Create, instructors can produce their own e-books or printed texts by selecting content from a vast library of resources – and receive a digital proof in under an hour. ... "

Kno Offers a Second, Lighter Tablet Computer For College Market

NYTimes.com:

Most of the companies that hope to take on Apple in the white-hot market for tablets are industry giants like Dell, Google, HP, Microsoft and Samsung. But among the startups looking to become tablet contenders, Kno stands out.

I first wrote about Kno in June, when the company unveiled a dual-screen tablet aimed at college students. The knock against the chunky, 14-inch screen was its heft; it weighs 5.5 pounds, or nearly four times more than Apple’s iPad, and each slab was more than half an inch thick.

It seems as if the criticism was heard. On Monday, months before the first tablet, called the Kno, will ship, the company is unveiling a second model. The new Kno is a single-screen version of the previous device. Both are expected to begin shipping in December.

“From the college perspective, the overwhelming feedback is that the dual panel is great, but some students think a single panel is better for them,” said Osman Rashid, a founder and the chief executive of Kno. ...

Ingram Launches VitalSource App for Apple Devices

Publishers Weekly: "Today Ingram announced the launch of VitalSource Bookshelf, an iOS (iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch) app for its VitalSource program, which enables access to digital textbooks for academic institutions and students. This is a major step in making Ingram’s academic content easily accessible to students and faculty, and in making the iPad an increasingly useful device for students. Like the Kindle and Nook apps, the VitalSource app syncs reading between devices and retains all reader highlights and notes. VitalSource has a catalog of over 60,000 titles from many textbook publishers."

Digital-Textbook Design Formula Proves Elusive

NYTimes.com:

"The most complicated form in print media is the textbook,” Josh Koppel of ScrollMotion explained to me. “You have a 1,000-page math text with 10,000 more pages of homework assignments. You’ve got the graphic side, the text side, notation, assessment, remediation. And we need to make this all live well digitally without being subtractive.”

Early this year, a consortium of educational publishers, including McGraw-Hill; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and Kaplan, signed up with ScrollMotion to produce their products for the iPad. In trying to nail the tablet-computer design, Koppel has papered his office wall with old baseball cards, tears from Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs (1880s and 1960s), a military edition of Thomas Beer’s “Mauve Decade,” the final issue of Weekly World News — the most inspired text and graphic solutions from years past. He says his fear, as we shift from analog to digital textbooks, is that some content — and with it some culture — will fall by the wayside. “This is what we have to fight: ‘Oh, we lost another thing!’ ” Koppel says. “Pretty soon nobody even knows we’ve lost it." ...

Dynamic Books, College Open Textbooks in Pact to Offer Affordable Textbooks

Publishers Weekly:

Dynamic Books, a publishing platform and line of customizable digital textbooks from Macmillan, announced an agreement with College Open Textbooks to identify quality public domain or open licensed textbooks that can be integrated into the Dynamic Books platform. College Open Textbooks has identified 27 open textbooks on a variety of academic subjects that will be made available through Dynamic Books beginning in January 2011 for a fee of $20 per student per term.

College Open Textbooks is a nonprofit coalition of 15 institutions formed to help reduce the cost of textbooks by finding and promoting the use of public domain, peer reviewed textbooks. COT identifies and promotes the use of these texts (either found in the public domain or licensed under a open Creative Commons copyright) to more than 2000 community colleges around the country. ...

Barnes & Noble's Digital Textbook Rental Service Is Great, Except For The Downloading Your Textbook Part

The Consumerist: "Before you spend money on a time-sensitive e-textbook rental from Barnes & Noble's new NOOKstudy application, take a look through the complaints that have popped up in the past few days on the bookseller's customer forum. Several threads exist where students are complaining that their rentals aren't coming through, but it seems B&N's tech support was away for the weekend because there's been no official response yet"

Transforming Stanford's Med School with the iPad

Stanford: "Stanford’s medical school joins a small but growing group of educational institutions across the nation experimenting with iPads as a way to lighten the load of textbook-toting students, and to learn how best to teach an extremely tech-savvy generation of students who’ve grown up in a wired world. ... The iPads are equipped with iAnnotate, a note-taking software program that enables students to write directly onto text, to sketch diagrams, to copy text and add highlights or underline with the drag of a finger."

Amazon's Kindle DX Gets Mixed Reviews in College Classrooms

Seeking Alpha: "The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business converted many case studies used in first year classes and selected 62 students and 10 faculty members for a pilot program. Although students approved of the large screen and ability to reduce the need to carry large amounts of paper, the Kindle did not offer sufficient flexibility in a classroom environment. Difficulty annotating cases and quickly accessing different documents were cited as major limitations of the device and some students eventually abandoned the Kindle in favor of laptops or paper. ... "

Eric Frank, Founder/CEO of Flat World Knowledge, Talks About The Future of the Textbook

Dianna Dilworth, eBookNewser: "Flat World Knowledge, a publisher of openly-licensed college textbooks has doubled its business this year. This semester, the company is selling books on more than 800 college campuses, up from 400 last fall. EbookNewser caught up with Eric Frank, founder/CEO of Flat World Knowledge to discuss how the textbook business is evolving. ..."