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Textbooks Are So Old School
Update 5/6 8:09 AM: Here it is!
Prediction: By the time the Class of 2015 is taking Freshman Humanities Seminar, all their texts will be digital. And they will not pay $100 for a textbook of which they only read 80 percent (they will pay for 80 percent).
With Google scanning books ever faster for Google Book Search, and Amazon.com allowing users to search and preview books, and a new Kindle device launching this Wednesday, the future of books is digital. Soon, CMC students will save hundreds of dollars per semester and learn more efficiently.
Recent news clips:
“Google has been scanning millions of books all along trying to digitize as many as it possibly can. It is so serious about capturing and indexing the knowledge stored in books that it has a patent, which was issued on March 24, 2009, on how to scan books faster than was previously possible… There are other book scanning projects besides the Google Book Project. The Internet Archive, for instance, runs 18 scanning centers around the world, which all together digitize only 1,000 books a day.”
–”It Turns Out That Google Even Has a Competitive Advantage in Scanning Books,” TechCrunch.com, May 2nd, 2009
Books will become increasingly searchable, so you don’t have to flip through the indexes of dozens of books (if they have indexes) to find the information you need.
“For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.”
“You’ll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage’s true meaning. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading.”
–”How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2009
The past and the future
My corporate finance course, as many courses do, covers about ~70 percent of the content in our textbook. Why are we paying $180 for the full textbook when we don’t use 30 percent of it?! CMC students could probably save an aggregate $300,000 if we paid by the chapter. (Remember: nobody thought people would buy music by the song until the iTunes Store came along.) Now imagine how much cheaper textbooks would be if other costs associated with the dead tree version were not built in– publisher, manufacturing, transportation, book store margin, etc.
Today:
“Amazon.com Inc. on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter
Beginning in the fall, some students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland will be given large-screen Kindles with textbooks for chemistry, computer science, and a freshman seminar already installed.”
–”Amazon to Launch Kindle for Textbooks,” Wall Street Journal, May 4, 2009
There are hurdles to overcome, of course. This is only a sign of what’s to come.
One problem will be the price– the eBook readers will be expensive at first and books will not be priced appropriately as publishers, just like music record labels, try to grasp onto what profits they can for the next few years.
Another problem will be general consumer and publisher hestitancy– people are slow to accept change. When Google launched Gmail a few years ago, they knew they did not have the capacity and could not afford to let millions of people store 2 gigabytes of e-mail forever; competitors thought they were crazy. They just knew that soon enough, as always, semiconductor and hardware prices would decrease and become more efficient, allowing them to offer more storage space. Similarly, all the technology in the current iPhone was available well before 2000– it was just way too expensive to produce on a mass scale. They launched products before the world was really ready for them. (Note: Apple is rumored to be launching a “mediapad” device soon.)
People aren’t ready to read all their books on a screen. Then again, they won’t be ready to read newspapers online until Wednesday; my parents still get home delivery. I think they’ll change that after Wednesday.
Next superdork installment at the Forum: “The end of the paper notebook”
More posts by Josh »
Josh Siegel
Josh Siegel is a senior at CMC and isn't looking forward to graduating.
8 Comments
2009-05-05
13:23:00
I'm waiting for the day when you can reliably pirate textbooks. Textbooktorrents.com was clutch for a while until it got taken down a few times. A viable threat to publishers profit margins can be good and force publishers to change their distribution methods and ludicrous pricing structure. That should speed up this projected transition to e-readers.
2009-05-05
15:46:59
I'm sure the day we can pirate Mankiw's Intro Econ textbook and classics like Libby and Short won't be far away, but the day when we can pirate upper level books like Analysis of Financial Time Series that only thousands of students around the world are capable of understanding may be in the very distant future, if at all.
Sure, we can pirate Kanye West, MGMT, and other music with millions of fans pretty easily, but think about music with the same size audience as a textbook like Analysis of Financial Time Series.
2009-05-05
15:52:45
By the way, I think the days of "textbooks" might be soon over. If I were a professor and had the option, I'd assign readings on each subject in the course, not an entire textbook. A reading on French electoral systems from one author, a chapter on English Parliament from another.
In effect, professors will be making their own "textbooks" from a combination of texts, just as some professors currently have "course packets."
2009-05-05
15:57:25
CMC faculty will be slow to adopt this, of course. Especially the government and history department.
Just as our website is a piece of shit made over a decade ago, our course registration is still done in person, and our housing process is a multi-day in-person extravaganza, our textbook policy will remain obsolete for far too long.
2009-05-05
17:17:05
Josh has a good point about their needing to be a mass audience for pirating but currently many texts are pirated and online. Maybe not your specific book, but you can find macro, micro, and intro econ books as well as plenty of bio/chem/physics stuff. I found the entire examkrackers MCAT package and the entire powerscores LSAT package. Aar!!!
2009-05-05
21:55:43
One thing: Eyes. My eyes hurt enough from staring at my computer when I'm not reading textbooks, and I'm loathe to think what will happen when everything I read has to be in digital form. Granted, one could always just print out the ebook, but after a while I have a feeling that we'll need to googletextbook each other with notes, etc. in the margins, and then I'll have to read the text online. Headaches galore.
2009-05-05
22:08:26
It doesn't use an LCD display like a computer, cell phone, or TV screen. It uses e-ink display, which looks just like real paper and doesn't cause eye strain.
E-Ink on Wikipedia
E-Ink
2009-05-06
10:12:00
First, a response to the piracy advocates. An author, or team of authors, along with editors, designers, other issue and subject experts, reviewers and more usually work for three to five years to develop a single textbook. While these activities are going on, another team creates the research, study, e-tutor, self-assessment, video and other digital platforms that supplement the textbook. Nice to know that you feel free to steal all of their individual and collective work and investment. Should I presume, then, you also think it is OK for someone to steal your computer so they can have access to the pirated works on your hard drive and, perhaps, all of the papers you’ve written and your personal stuff for the last three to five years. You know, pirate the pirate. According to your logic that would be fair and reasonable. Right?
For those who wish to buy their textbooks by the chapter, go to iChapters.com. This site was created by a publisher, Cengage. It’s great for budgeting and you can buy just what you need just when you need it. Expect to see more of these sites. If you want e-books at a discount of about 50% off the printed textbook price, go to Coursesmart.com, another site created by publishers.
Another bit of info, the fastest growing segment of the postsecondary textbook sector is the instructor designed custom textbook that includes materials from multiple sources. The custom includes only what will be used in the class so students do not have to pay for materials they do not use. Customs cost less and, I should note, are very popular.
In general, it is important to recognize that publishers are not printers. They are agnostic about how their content is delivered. Whether printed or digital, the market will choose and the publishers will provide.