Instead
of trying to persuade K-12 schools or district boards to adopt digital
textbooks on a widespread scale, Kno is embarking on a different strategy:
marketing e-textbooks to parents one at a time.
The software
company just signed up to license textbook content from Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt to create digital versions of its K-12 books, which Kno will rent to
Mom and Dad at $9.99 per year per title, or as Kno CEO Osman Rashid put it,
“for the price of a couple of Happy Meals.”
HMH
has an estimated 50% of the K-12 textbook market, which means there’s an awful
lot of kids out there with at least one HMH title in their backpacks. As Publishers Weekly explained, the digital
texts will reproduce the pages of the printed texts, so Junior doesn’t get
confused in doing homework. But the e-books will also sport helpful extras,
such as 3-D animated demonstrations, flash cards, highlighting, and a digital
journal for note-taking.
TechCrunch
pointed out the pricing doesn’t exactly add up to a pot of gold for Kno,
although for the publisher it’s bonus money on top of the print sales. However,
Rashid is banking on the low price to attract more parents to try out the
digital books at home. Once they do, he hopes they’ll push for adoption at
their children’s schools.
If
more youngsters get accustomed to digital books while still in K-12, in a few
years that could ratchet up demand for the college-level digital books that Kno
already provides through partnerships with higher-education publishers.
