Some of the largest education publishers say that most
of their sales and revenues are from digital products. Both McGraw-Hill
Education and Cengage Learning are releasing financial information for 2015
that backs up that claim.
This shift to digital would represent a major milestone
for the industry, but there are questions about how publishers define “digital
sales.”
According to Carl Straumsheim of Inside HigherEducation,
digital sales at Cengage can mean selling access to a digital product, but also
selling an e-book, a textbook bundled with online components, or digital
supplementary material. McGraw-Hill also counts bundles, but only reports the
portion of the sales value of the digital component. Pearson does not
differentiate between digital and print sales.
Publishers have even started promoting themselves as
providers of digital course material because it sounds better than saying the
firms are still driven by print, according to management consultant Joseph J.
Esposito. He added that digital course materials give publishers a way to sell
directly to students, lowering their costs and subsequently textbook prices.
“No college publisher likes to talk about this because
they don’t want to alienate the retail channel, which they need right now,” Esposito
wrote in an email to Straumsheim.
