Learn from Wiley’s Legacy and Leadership

Guest Blog: Veronica Gancov, Digital Media Specialist, NACS-MS

The transition from print to digital for many publishers can be a difficult one, but for Wiley, a company that has been in business for more than 200 years, persistence has been key to their online success. Their transition from print to digital is examined in the Book Business webinar "Learn From Wiley’s Legacy and Leadership." Wiley began its digital transition more than 10 years ago, and it has honed its online presence into that of a leader in the field of academic and scientific publishing.

Since 1995, Wiley has explored all avenues of online and ebook formats, beginning with “Journal of Interactive Surgery.” In 2010, Wiley launched the “Wiley Online Library,” which is the second most-visited academic publisher web site according to Alexa Web traffic metrics. They have amassed more than 9,000 books, and hundreds of multi-volume reference works, laboratory protocols, and databases.

Under Wiley’s outgoing CEO and President of 23 years, William J. Pesce, Wiley consistently gained market share and profitability, and executed three of the largest and most successful acquisitions in the company’s history. Pesce says that the development work in going digital is incremental, layering on technology along with print.

Wiley has looked for multiple formats and multiple modes of delivery on its path to becoming a digital leader, and has designed and redesigned many workflows to find the optimal one. Wiley also acquired different partnerships with other companies, as well as acquiring other companies outright, and recruited talent from outside the publishing business in order to have greater control over their digital formats.

Stephen Smith, Wiley’s incoming President & CEO, who has been with the company since 1992, commented on the way that Wiley has prioritized what they wanted handled in-house as opposed to outsourcing the digital process. According to Smith, Wiley has always wanted to add value to the customer. He emphasizes that digital strategy is a huge consideration for any publishing business, and that the more flexible the content formats are that are offered, the more value is added to the customer.

When Wiley InterScience was launched, the company knew they needed a partner for the technical project of putting the journal online and developing access controls and search functions. Since Wiley did not have the capabilities in house, they brought them in house and found ways to work with them.

In December, Wiley Blackwell, the STMS and scholarly business publishing division of Wiley, announced the launch of mobile apps for select science journals. Smith sees this as a stand alone revenue opportunity, and he sees mobile as part of the overall mix, with advertising opportunities that will be interesting as well. Smith also states that although they are exploring these new avenues, they have not abandoned print altogether, but utilize POD to handle the lesser print load.

Publishers Try to Come to Grips with Digital Challenge

Publishing executives painted a rather gloomy picture of their world at the first World E-Reading Congress recently in London. According to this article in paidContent UK, the printed book is in trouble and publishers just aren’t yet sure what to do with its digital counterpart.

“The entire publishing industry is going down the drain,” an executive from Siemens told the publishers in a sponsored address about a tablet publishing software service. While most attendees probably don’t actually believe that, they are trying to tell their stories in new ways through technology such as iPhone apps.

They want to learn from the painful lessons of the music industry, but also fear competition that ranges from self-publishing authors to e-tail giants such as Amazon, which recently launched its own publishing imprint for romance novels.

“We need to anticipate and create new business models that give consumers access when they want it,” said Victoria Barnsley, international CEO at HarperCollins.

CAMEX questions answered: marketing

This week's question provides a good example from a store of "why digital," the importance of relationships, market share orientation, and other topics:

Q. We have had good relationships with our publishers and faculty in crossing the digital divide hand in hand. We have come to find that the MyLab products and other digital content have helped secure market share and lower prices at the same time. We even have created displays to highlight those ebook products to our students. [Example provided with data on sell-through, savings for students, and percent of market share captured]. Has NACS looked at in-store merchandising, loss prevention, and in-store promotion material for publisher's ebook options?

Thanks for your question. It sounds like you have started off in the right direction -- building positive relationships, paying attention to market share in addition to margins, and thinking about how to merchandise digital products as something different from traditional products.

To answer your direct question, yes, we have thought about some of these questions. In particular the in-store merchandising and in-store promotion materials. In fact, we convened a short-term task force who helped us develop a first phase marketing toolkit for stores. That toolkit was about 85-90% complete, but then stalled with the departure of the key staff person who managed the project. It is our intention to resurrect that project later this year as the task force did some excellent work and we do not want that information to be lost or go unshared with stores.

We have observed that the stores who report higher sell-through on digital content are typically the ones who provide more transactional education to students about what they are buying when they buy the digital option. Students know what they are getting when they get the physical printed textbook. The same is often not the case with digital. Different DRM, different licensing terms, different user experience, and other differences between products in the same category make it a more complex (and potentially less satisfying) purchasing decision.

I saw a statistic earlier this week that reported consumers weigh trust as nearly 10x more important than price when making an online purchasing decision. The same is true, in a sense, with digital. Students are not as sure of what they are buying (they trust the product less) and so are more reticent to purchase. Stores that have recognized this challenge and provided educational information have seen sell-through on digital sometimes up to double the typical average. This educational information can be displayed in a number of ways -- whether comparison details on an in-store sign or terminal, explanatory information provided along with the student course list, or creating a "demo-bar" concept to let students "see what they are buying."

Because of differences among products, the transaction cost of selling digital is higher for retailers because it requires more education of the consumer. Focus your in-store marketing efforts in that direction and you should see some success. Beyond that, our marketing toolkit initiative looked at a variety of methods to promote digital options in-store, and again, we hope to get those resources out to stores later this year.

A final quick note -- the question also asked about loss prevention. This is not an area we have looked at closely as it relates to digital options. Perhaps some of the other readers on this list have some suggestions to share -- either marketing ideas or ideas for loss prevention.

Open Road Making Backlist Authors Accessible

A new digital publishing venture, Open Road Media, is dealing directly with authors or their estates to publish and aggressively market well-known backlist titles as e-books. National Public Radio highlights the firm’s efforts on a new electronic version of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, which restores passages from the original text that were deemed inappropriate when the book was first released in the 1950s, and also includes videos to enhance the project.

The strategy of targeting backlist authors from traditional publishing companies has caught the attention of those venerable firms. “The question is: In what direction will they evolve?” asked publishing consultant Lorraine Shanley. “We’re all watching with eager anticipation.”

Open Road is headed down other paths as well, publishing its own titles that appear first in digital form, called “e-riginals.” And it’s formed partnerships with smaller publishers that can make use of its digital and marketing expertise.

Open Road Media hasn’t turned its attention to the textbook market—at least not yet—but is providing one more convenient avenue for readers to become comfortable with digital text.

McGraw-Hill Digital Resource Platform

University Business has a new On-Demand web seminar (free if you sign up) on McGraw-Hill's new digital resource platform. According to the seminar, via the platform McGraw-Hill will give all professors full access to all curricular resources and tools, whether or not they use a McGraw-Hill textbook.

For professors, getting access to relevant and trusted online instructional resources and tools has been an ad-hoc, hit-or-miss process. This web seminar will demonstrate McGraw-Hill Campus, a new service that provides all faculty members across campus with one-click, unlimited access to McGraw-Hill's entire library of academic e-content and associated tools - directly from within the course management system. There is no fee for the platform, and instructors can use it regardless of whether or not they use a McGraw-Hill textbook.

This is the same platform which BlackBoard and McGraw-Hill have been piloting on different campuses this year. The McGraw-Hill tools include "an application to help faculty create digital course content and assignments and do automatic grading" and another which "lets faculty compile textbooks that use their own materials as well as content from the company's publishing portfolio." The integration of the tools with BlackBoard can allow students to buy the textbooks via a link on the course site.

Students Slowly Accepting Tablet Computing

Apple’s introduction if its iPad a year ago appears to have upended the personal computing world according to this article in the Los Angeles Times. Among the repercussions, Microsoft stock recently experienced its largest single-day drop in two years on declining software sales.

Experts expect 50 million tablets to be sold this year, up from 19 million in 2010, with more than 100 million in 2012. While laptop sales will continue to be strong worldwide, manufacturers say they believe tablet sales will eclipse laptop sales in the United States next year.

Yet questions remain on college campuses. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that students at the Stanford School of Medicine stopped using iPads given to them a few weeks into the first term of use, preferring printed course materials instead. In addition, rebuilding wireless infrastructure on campus to support mobile devices can be expensive while getting students, faculty, and staff working together on the educational possibilities of the gadget often works better in some fields than other.

E-Readers Aren’t Ready for School Yet

College students will likely continue to watch the development of e-readers from the sidelines because the devices simply aren’t yet suited for use on campus. That’s the conclusion of a blogger for the Seattle Times, who looks at the findings from a pilot study using Amazon’s Kindle DX at the University of Washington.

After seven months of use, fewer than 40% of the computer sciences and engineering graduate students taking part in the study used the device for homework. They found the Kindle DX to be poor for note-taking, and said skimming text and looking up references were difficult.

While those are all problems that could be fixed with future upgrades, the study also suggests the digital text disrupts a learning technique called cognitive mapping, which allows readers to use physical cues, such as the location of words on the page, to help retain and recall information.

A possible solution may be found in tablet computers such as the iPad, because the Apple device is able to bolster conventional text and images with interactive and multimedia content, according to Fast Company.

CAMEX questions answered: DCP

This week's question from CAMEX relates to our digital content platform or DCP project within NACS Media Solutions. Many aspects of the project have been led by Chris Tabor at Queens University and the Canadian Campus Retail Associates (CCRA). I asked Chris to help me respond to this week's question.

Q. When will the DCP platform be available in the US, including textbook access codes for content? What else will be part of this platform?

Its a good two part question and perhaps worthy of a longer article on the complexities and broader implications of the platform. This project has been evolving over the past 12-18 months. Currently we have about 115 schools participating, with roughly 75 of those being in the US and the rest in Canada. New elements are typically rolled out and tested in Canada first, and then subsequently rolled down to the states. The participating US stores are currently live with a selction of free, public domain content.

In lieu of a longer article on the platform, for now the short answer to Part A is that the next phase of the system will begin to be deployed over the the next several weeks at select schools with select publishers. The goal is to have a solution ready for a large number of US schools in time for fall 2011.

Part B, As you may be aware the Canadian version of the platform system has commercially distributed mainstream publisher access codes for two academic terms. More recently faculty authored content and ebooks were added for commercial distribution at two universities. The platform also distributes classroom management applications or licences.

To date the system distributes only those codes and materials required by the instructor, which accounts for the near 100 percent sell through . However in the US version optional codes and materials will be available as will many trade titles. Of particular interest to developers is the capability of the platform to distribute software applications or licenses.

Think of it this way: generally the system distributes access to two kinds of materials. The first is static content such as pdfs and epubs or etextbooks. The second is dynamic content (think web site) and the system sells access to the web site in the form of licences or access codes.

The shorter answer to Part B: The platform can and will accommodate most forms of digital course materials and, more importantly, most digital course material distribution models.

We are planning increased communication to current participating stores, and then to our broader membership over the summer months of 2011. Some additional information can be located at http://campusebookstore.com/

Educational Publishing at Work

Today's post is a guest-posting by Veronica Gancov. Veronica is the new Digital Media Specialist within NACS Media Solutions. She joined us in February and is leading some of our work in the regional print-on-demand area. Veronica will likely become a regular guest blogger to the CITE. While this first posting is publisher-focused, I think many stores will see the parallels in, and implications for, educational retail.

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I recently attended BISG's “Educational Publishing at Work” webinar. The panelists included Charlene Gaynor, CEO, The Association of Educational Publishers; Michael Ross, SVP, Encyclopaedia Britannica; and Christian Schamberger, VP of Operations, Mercury Book Printing. The webinar raised many interesting points, the first being that since students today are “natives” of digital technology, such as the internet, video games and mobile technology, teachers need to adapt and become more tech savvy in their teaching methods in order to reach these students. Likewise, as teachers must, Publishers today must adapt to digital technology in order to maintain their business standing and reach those students as well. New business models must be written, and new delivery systems must be explored in order to stay current and relevant in the wake of the digital age.

Gaynor's main point was that moving products from print to digital will be one of the top five strategies for impacting the bottom line of any publishing company. She also believes that “free is your friend,” and that supplying some free content is also good for your bottom line, as sales have been proven to increase when some content is given out for free. Gaynor also recommends hiring for a digital future, in other words, choosing people who are technology minded and can see the benefits of digital progress.

Encyclopaedia Britannica has been around since 1768. Ross commented on how change is a must in order to stay relevant. In addition to pursuing digital formats such as online databases, print sets, ebooks, and e-learning solutions for all age groups and readers, Encyclopaedia Britannica strives to provide specific curriculum products for everyone from Pre-K to college and university students. Ross stresses that pricing must be kept low and attainable for everyone, and that subscription models, in particular automatic renewals, work for his company. He stresses that Publishers interested in switching to a digital format must establish a 5 year strategy, and that they need to hire people who will move their digital strategy forward.

Schamberger said that “times can look bleak for printers who do not adapt to the current economy and technology.” Mercury is no stranger to change, and has grown from a printing press in someone’s basement, to a successful printer with three print divisions: Offset, Book, and Fulfillment. Mercury is adapting to the economy and new technologies by continuing to invest in new digital printing technologies, such as inkjet printers that are faster, increase automation, incur cheaper costs, and enable enormous volume capability. He also sees Print on Demand as a great way for printers to fulfill a need in the market. He says that publishers need the flexibility to offer both an electronic format of a product as well as a printed product, and says that they must embrace new technologies and partner with printers who have, as well as challenging traditional thinking and norms.

Correction on projections on etextbook sales

Okay. A couple months ago there was the piece in Campus Technology entitled Can Tech Transcend the Textbook. A good article but it contains a line which has been quoted in a number of places, most recently in the technology section (page 8) of the May issue of the CACS newsletter. Here is the quote:

According to the National Association of College Stores (NACS), digital books currently account for less than 3 percent of textbook sales. NACS expects that percentage to reach 10 to 15 percent by 2012.

Here is the problem: statistics that are quoted out of context or incompletely -- which then tell a very different story. The odd one here is that as the lead digital content person for NACS, I am certain I was not interviewed or addressed as part of the original story, or for any of the many follow-ups. Thus a set of statistics have been attributed to me or us and I have yet to find the source. Here is probably the more accurate interpretation or reporting of these statistics...

Stat1: digital books currently account for less than 3 percent of textbook sales. This is true. What it should say though is:

In cases where digital is an option, typical sell-through (i.e., the percentage of students purchasing the digital option as compared to number of students in a class), is typically around 3%.

We do have some institutions where this number goes as high as 7% as an average. And there are a growing number of cases where adoption in a particular class goes much higher (even over 90%), but those larger percentages are still more the exception. However, from the institutions we have sampled, typically over 80% of the titles adopted are not available in a digital format. We expect this number to change, and quickly, but inventory access is still a challenge -- and why few schools could go "all digital" in the next two years.

Stat2: NACS expects that percentage to reach 10 to 15% by 2012. This is possible, and one scenario we have evaluated. I think the challenge here is the use of the word "expects." It would be more accurate to say that we anticipate that it COULD reach as much as 10-15% IN 2012. I think that it is unlikely that we will hit that level by the end of the year (i.e., by 2012) -- it is possible, but not probable.

Actual expectations are harder to pinpoint. It does seem realistic to expect that we will hit 20-25% penetration of digital in 2015, at which point the early majority is moving toward adoption and penetration rate will likely begin to climb very quickly. We saw this with online sale of books and now digital trade books. With the right set of factors in place, this COULD happen sooner. It is possible that by fall of 2012 we could start seeing average digital sell through nearing 10% or more.

Whether we are talking 2012, 2015, or some point later -- I think the point of interest is that the shift is coming. Retailers, publishers, and institutions that choose not to prepare or keep abreast of the changes and technologies will be at risk. I think the last paragraph of Kirk Jarvis's piece in the previously referenced CACS piece sums things up well:

The textbook industry is definitely at a crossroads. Where will it end up? Only time will tell. What I think will keep our industry from going completely digital right now is simply the confusion factor. There are just too many digital platforms and e-readers out there. We, as industry peers, must remain informed of new technologies and changes in the market.

Finally, kudos to CACS for creating an ad-hoc technology committee focused on investigating and reporting back on new textbook technologies that may affect our business. The more we as an industry engage in experimentation and widespread environmental scanning -- and share what we learn -- the better positioned the channel will be to evolve with the world around us.

Inventing the college store of the future

Campus Technology has an article this week about what happens to college stores if "dead tree tech" gets edged out by digital textbook alternatives. It is an interesting piece which echoes some recommendations we have made in the past -- and re-emphasizes that a shift to digital does not need to mean the end for physical stores. One of the early quotes in the piece -- from Isabella Hinds at Follett, captures this idea well. She notes:

The advent of this technology isn't going to eliminate the need for college bookstores. It's disruptive--or it will be, eventually--but the role of the bookstore is already evolving. The college bookstore of the future is likely to be a very different environment. The digital textbook is going to be one of a range of course-material offerings...delivered on a variety of devices. As these options proliferate, the expertise of the bookstore personnel will be much more important. They will become trusted advisers who can talk knowledgeably about the strengths and weaknesses of increasingly sophisticated and complex products.

Hinds' comments reflect similar recommendations and reactions here at the National Association of College Stores (NACS), and can be found in our report, Defining the College Store of 2015, which is available to members.

It is about creating value and relevance for students and faculty in new ways. Two additional quotes from the article:

"The stores that are becoming the resident experts on these educational technologies are gaining tremendous favor points with professors, administration, and students," Gallagher notes. "It's about maintaining a relationship with the customer and adding value in the form of expertise." -- K Gallagher, Bowker

"College stores must earn students' 'love' by being relevant to their specific, evolving needs and expectations. Growing share of campus life must be a top priority for campus stores--followed by communicating this valuable role to key stakeholders." -- NACS

Indeed, we are already seeing a number of stores create "genius bar"-like concepts designed to help faculty and students understand their digital options and how to access them. Have a problem accessing a digital textbook, or don't understand how to access one publisher's content versus another (or why they are different)? Well, that is a role that the store will be able to help answer.

Given the early stages of many of these technologies, another challenge for students and faculty is matching content to devices. Stores will ultimately be the device and format agnostic providers, and will help students make sure the content they are buying is not only the right content for the course, but the right content for their device(s). It also means that stores must explore multiple approaches to delivering content -- print or digital. Yet another quote from the piece highlights this point:

"There's absolutely no doubt that the long-term survival of the college bookstore will require some strategic adaptations," he says. "And you really just have to embrace the technology. We decided our best bet would be to invest in multiple approaches, to jump right into the deep end with both feet.

"My words of wisdom to my colleagues are pretty simple. You can't do all this in a tepid fashion--you have to commit all the way. You have to invest in multiple approaches to hedge your bets on the shifting winds of the technology. And monitor your results. The evolution of this thing we call a bookstore isn't over." -Jeff Levin, Varney's Bookstore

The article contains a number of interesting points and quotes -- from discussing the lingering preponderance of print, to print-on-demand (POD), to talking "tech rather than textbooks," building relationships with students, textbook rentals, open source textbooks, and redefining retail. In the end it is really all about adding value and reconsidering the retail role of the college store:

"If textbooks do go mostly digital, then the campus bookstore simply has to become more of a retail center. [The college bookstore is no longer the place] where you have to go to get everything. Students have more choices now. There's local competition, as well as the internet. But we're convinced that there's still a lot of value to the college bookstore. Students aren't paying for shipping charges, returns are easier, and they get help to make sure they're buying the correct book. In the end, it's about adding value." -- Sue Riedman, NBC

All-in-all, a great piece that covers a lot of textbook and college store ground in a short space. It is great to see a positive and opportunity-focused piece on the college store industry. However, the piece does make one thing clear -- the business is ours to lose. College stores are uniquely well positioned to make it through a transition to new business models. However, success in doing so requires intention and willingness to experiment and move toward an as yet somewhat unclear future vision.

Everything Marketers Should Know About QR Codes

QR codes are all the rage in marketing these days. The two-dimensional bar codes store tons of marketing information, can be printed on nearly any kind of surface (think cake frosting and temporary tattoos), and, best of all, the tools needed to create and read them are free.

This article from SearchEngineWatch.com lists 14 tools, tactics, and best practices marketers should know about QR codes to get started. The article has plenty of basic information about QR codes, along with links to the free code generators and readers.

Along with the helpful tools and information, the author provides a QR codes checklist and worksheet to help plan a QR marketing campaign.

CAMEX questions answered: DRM

Sorry for no posting of store questions last week, it has been a bit hectic here lately. Some exciting announcements are coming though!

This week's question from CAMEX relates to DRM or digital rights management.

Q. When is the contention about DRM going to be over, so more publishers will allow educational books in more digital devices, not just proprietary or computers?

Some publishers are already DRM friendly -- meaning they have done away with DRM. Look at the open source community, or O'Reilly Publishers as two great examples. This move among traditional publishers to "DRM free" is likely to be quite slow.

Some the constraints are not on the publisher side, but the device side, with proprietary content formats -- or expecting content to be optimized for the particular device. Such formats require publishers to put out content in "yet another format" which becomes increasingly difficult to manage, and has a number of costs. The move to common standards, like .epub3, will help with this problem.

Another approach we are seeing is a shift to more interactive content where "screen-scraping" and other approaches to lifting content result in content which is meaningless from the original. Such approaches changes the need for DRM. I have read or seen content and interesting approaches to this type of content distribution going on in Africa and other locations outside the US, so it is only a matter of time we see it here too.

DRM, however, is likely to be part of the landscape for a while. I would not expect the contention to die down much in the next few years. Maybe one day publishers will offer their textbooks for free, and generate revenue from all the value-added components and ancillaries that help with self-assessment, tutoring, or make the content come alive.

Video: IPads for Textbooks in Singapore

An interesting video detailing the adoption of iPads to replace textbooks at a school in Singapore:

Last Typewriter Manufacturer Closes

In yet another signal of change, on Monday The Atlantic reported on the last typewriter factory in the world closing its doors earlier this week. Many in the States might have thought that typewriters disappeared years ago -- not long after 8-track tapes. While still a booming business overseas up to a few years ago, in the past two decades the typewriter business has declined beyond the point of sustainability as computing -- and particularly mobile computing has spread rapidly around the globe.

The final manufacturer, Godrej and Boyce, has about 200 new units left in stock. Hurry now for this rapidly disappearing collector's item!

Textbook Costs Gone Wild

Sometimes, you just can’t make this stuff up...

College students always complain about the cost of textbooks, but imagine the howls if they had to shell out the eight-figure price for a single title that Michael Eisen wrote about in a recent blog post. The evolutionary biologist from the University of California, Berkleley, was searching Amazon.com for The Making of a Fly by Peter Lawrence when he found 17 used editions priced for less than $36 apeice—and two, unused copies of the out-of-print book listed at just over $1.7 million, and nearly $2.2 million, respecctively (not including shipping).

Thinking it had to be a computer glitch, he reloaded the page. When he did, the price had increased to nearly $2.8 million. He kept tabs on the title and saw it ended the day priced at more than $3.5 million.

Theorizing he was watching pricing algorithms gone wild, Eisen monitored the prices for more than a week, with the cheaper edition reaching $5.6 million and the more expensive title upward of $7.2 million. “Clearly at least one of the sellers was setting their price algorithmically in response to changes in the other’s price,” he observed.

Eisen concluded that pricing algorithms provide endless possibilities for mischief if no one is paying attention. In the case of The Making of a Fly, amazon.com finally did catch the error and dropped the price to $106.23 and $134.97 respectively, spoiling all the fun.

The future of mobile technology

Great video news story on the BBC last week. BBC news unfortunately does not provide links for embedded video, and you will have to sit through a 15 second advert, but the 7 1/2 minute video is worth the wait.

The story focuses on Microsoft and Intel vs. mobile technology. There is an interesting technology concept twoard the end of the clip about the Motorola Atrix -- the concept being that in the future your full computing power could be in your smartphone, which can be plugged into a desktop/laptop-type docking station. There would be dual operating systems on the device to allow operation of either device platform, but all of your documents, content, books, work, etc., goes with you wherever you go. That presents some interesting implications and opportunities, and gives new meaning to the BYOC (bring your own computer) concept for both employees and students.

My favorite quote from the video appears early on, but is true for many retailers and probably much of higher education today:

History tells us that no matter who rules the world, if they fail to adapt they die out. If the environment changes, it is a case of evolve or be replaced by newer, more nimble creatures that are more suited to the changing conditions.

The story is referring to Microsoft and Intel, but if those companies are at risk in this technology revolution, what does that mean for small retailers and educational institutions that struggle to understand technology or decide when or if they should jump in?

The CITE added to Best Textbook Blogs

Thanks to DistanceEducation.net for adding The CITE at the #5 spot on their list of 50 Noteworthy Textbook Blogs. The listing has a number of other great blogs on there -- some which we have featured here, and some which are new to me. It is a useful resource to check out (and I would say that even if we had not made the list).

BGSU Open Source Textbook Webinar

Bowling Green State University (BGSU) hosted Eric Frank from Flat World for a presentation on textbook affordability and the open source textbook model. Here is the session description:

How can new open textbook models reduce costs by an average of 80% or more, keeping education accessible and affordable at a critical time in Ohio? Join us for this workshop, featuring Eric Frank, President and Co-Founder of Flat World Knowledge, as we discuss:

• How we've reached the era of the $200 textbook: a look at the root causes


• The impact of high prices on students including data on course completion rates


• A survey of emerging solutions with a focus on open textbooks and case study of Flat World Knowledge


• An overview of the partnership and pilot between the Ohio Board of Regents and Flat World Knowledge, including information for faculty interested in participating in the program.

WBGU recorded the broadcast “Textbook Affordability & Open Source Textbooks” event that was held yesterday and that archive video is available to the public for anyone who wasn’t able to participate directly.

Easiest access is via the BGSU Textbook Affordability web site and appears below.

iPads Making a Splash On Campus

The Apple iPad is making quite a splash on college campuses across the nation. Buena Vista University, Storm Lake, IA, plans to provide the tablet computer, along with a laptop computer, this fall, according to an article in Campus Technology.

“These are all important to effective learning, which is really the most important thing,” said Jamii Claiborne, assistant professor of media studies. “For students and faculty in media, the iPad means we can gather, create, edit, publish, promote, and then consume what we make—all from one small, mobile device. That’s exciting. Students and I have all been searching for relevant apps and telling each other about them. Together, as partners, we're figuring out how to use this new technology effectively.”

Then there’s experience at George Fox University, Newberg OR. The school, one of the first to provide students with laptop computers, jumped on the iPad bandwagon when the device hit the market last year. Now administrators there are ready to pull the plug on the program according to another Campus Technology article.

Students already show up on campus with smartphones in their hands and have begun to have table computers in their backpacks. So administrators at George Fox are looking at ending the giveaway program in favor of beefing up the school’s wireless network and to better accommodate the printing needs of the campus.

“Right now, we’re throwing tremendous amounts of resources into this whole idea of video management with the ultimate goal of developing more collaborative classrooms that are enabled with state-of-the-art technology,” said Greg Smith, chief information officer at the school.

Where ebook buyers live (in the US)

I have a fairly deep backlog (50+ items) to blog about, so today's post will come from that archive of interesting tidbits. A couple weeks ago there was an interesting posting on TeleRead on where e-book buyers live in the US. I thought this would make a nice light topic for a weekend post.

While the article points out the limitations to its method, as a baseline set of numbers it is somewhat interesting. Not surprisingly, the states with larger populations account for the largest number of ebook sales, with five states accounting for nearly a third of all ebook sales.

Top five states by percentage of total ebook sales: 1. TX 8.57%, 2. CA 7.99%, 3. NY 5.99%, 4. FL 5.93%, 5. PA 4.13%.

Bottom five states by percentage of total ebook sales: 46. ME 0.32%, 47. SD 0.29%, 48. DE 0.29%, 49. WY 0.26%, 50. VT 0.20%.

The District of Columbia ranked last at: 0.09%.

What is interesting is what happens to the rankings when the numbers are adjusted to a per-capita basis. The ratio tells us the propensity to buy e-books in those states. A ratio of 1.00 would be average. A person living in Alaska, with a ratio of 2.92, is nearly three times more likely to buy an ebook than a person in an average state. In contrast, someone in California (which has the second largest percentage of ebook sales) is about two-thirds as likely to buy an ebook as someone in an average state, and has the lowest e-reader rate per captia of any state.

Top five states by e-book per capita ratio: 1. AK 2.92, 2. ND 2.29, 3. UT 1.58, 4. WY 1.44, 5. VA 1.41.

Bottom five states by e-book per capita ratio: 46. HI 0.77, 47. WV 0.76, 48. ME 0.75, 49. MS 0.75, 50. CA 0.66.

Interestingly, as with ebook sales, DC falls well below the average with a per capita ratio of 0.46.

So what is happening in the U.S. Capitol? Would the stats look similar among other US cities? One theory why Alaska and North Dakota top the list might be the distance between cities or access to local bookstores. Anyway, it is some interesting analysis and as the original article suggests, it might be worth applying the original data set against other factors to see if there are other meaningful conclusions to draw. Perhaps that is a post for another weekend. :)

www.thetextbookguru.com

Here is a new blog that recently came across my radar: www.thetextbookguru.com. Jeff Cohen has created an interesting blog that contains links to a range of articles relevant to the course materials industry. His weekly round-up of articles of relevance to the industry provides a great sorting and scan of industry developments -- definitely a must read. The textbookguru will join my blogroll here as a blog to follow.

CAMEX questions answered: ebook sales

Week 5 post-CAMEX, and there are still a number of questions to answer on different topics. This week I thought I would address a couple of questions related to selling e-books. Upcoming topics in the next few weeks include questions related to m-commerce, the digital content platform project, publisher relations, campus relations, and getting staff ready for change.

Q1. I have no POS, can I sell e-books?

No POS? That will limit your options, but not cut you out of the game. The real question is probably, do you have ecommerce capability? Even that might not be a show stopper. There are options for stores that will allow you to sell ebooks online, where there is no need to integrate to an in-store POS or an existing ecommerce system. For example, you could work with the ABA's Indie Commerce solution or NACSCORP's My Books & More program with Baker & Taylor. These solutions are really tailored for smaller stores without an extensive ecommerce or POS capability. B&N, Follett, MBS, and others all have virtual bookstore options that can sell e-books online as well.

Q2. What percent of a title is usually sold as an e-book?

That can vary greatly, depending on a variety of factors, such as: (a) the title; (b) the faculty member; (c) how the store educates the student about the purchase decision; (d) the price; (e) availability of other options (e.g., number of used books, rental option, etc.); (f) demographic profile of your students; (g) DRM applied to the text; and the list goes on.

All of that being said, average sell-though right now looks like about 2-3%. We have seen a number of examples well over 30%, and even a few over 90%, but those are still more of the exception. E-book title availability is mostly within the large adoptions, and we did hear from a few schools this semester where the faculty member switched to an open source textbook for a large adoption, thus having big pick-up in digital adoption and subsequent impact on sales. This dynamic should be considered in your contingency planning processes and is likely to increase in the coming years with the current emphasis and funding for open source textbooks.

Readum links Google Books and Facebook

"Why should we divide our friends and fellow readers up by the devices they use?” the BookGlutton.com founder asked in this article in Publishers Weekly. The Readum platform builds a connection betweeen Google Books and Facebook. Readum allows readers to make comments on specific paragraphs in their Google Books. Those comments are then posted to Facebook groups or their Facebook wall. The app also creates an individual page for the comments and pulls any book listed into their Facebook profile.

While not yet as far along as other social media experiments for books environments (like Copia) the tool has the same idea at its base -- enabling communities of conversation around digital books. One aspect of the Readum approach that I like is that they are actively working to demonstrate the "proof of concept" by utilizing existing social networks rather than trying to build their own. That enables a more coherent strategy and focused development around competencies. It will be interesting to watch where this project goes.

A short video on Readum appears below:

Readum from Travis Alber on Vimeo.

Bleak Findings for Web Security in Symantec Report

The notion of web security is looking more like a contradiction in terms, according to the annual threat security report issued April 5 by Symantec. The report says daily web-based attacks increased 93% from 2009 to 2010 and that social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are particularly vulnerable.

Attackers use the popular social media sites to distribute malware because users trust messages they think are coming from friends. The Symantec report estimates that nearly 17% of all links posted to Facebook actually connect to malicious software. In addition, 65% of links that have used URL-shorteners were malicious—and 75% of those bad links were clicked on at least 11 times.

Mobile devices are not yet being targeted as often, but that could change soon as smartphones turn into electronic wallets with the use of near-field communications. This could prove a particularly troubling trend on college campuses as schools look for ways to make payment methods easier for students.

“The biggest issue right now is the false sentiment of security people have when using social networks or when installing smartphone apps,” says Catalin Cosoi, head of BitDefender’s Online Threat Labs, in an article for TechNewsWorld. “Since these services or devices are represented by known international institutions, they believe that they are safe.”

Readum App Links Google E-Books to Facebook

BookGlutton.com founder Travis Albers felt Google e-book readers needed to connect with their Facebook friends, so she’s providing a solution with the release of the new Readum social media application. The Readum app lets users of different e-reading platforms and devices add comments and notes to books in their Google e-book library and then post them to Facebook.

“Why should we divide our friends and fellow readers up by the devices they use?” the BookGlutton.com founder asked in this article in Publishers Weekly.

Readum allows readers to make comments on specific paragraphs in their books. Those comments are then posted to Facebook groups or their Facebook wall. The app also creates an individual page for the comments and pulls any book listed into their Facebook profile.

The app is limited to Facebook users at the moment, but Twitter support is planned, according to Aaron Miller of ReadSocial. Miller went on to say that by using ReadSocial API, developed by BookGlutton.com, developers and content providers will ultimately be able to tie any e-book to any social network or community.

Library study on student e-reader perceptions

A new preprint article is available from the Journal of Information Technology and Libraries. The article reports on a study by a librarian at Queens College (CUNY) on student usage of e-readers at the institution.

Not surprisingly, student uptake of devices is still low. This mirrors our data at NACS. As with other studies, the researcher found that students use the devices mostly for leisure reading, and prefer print for much of their reading. Price was noted as a primary barrier to getting an ereader device. Interestingly, students expressed little interest in borrowing e-reader compatible ebooks from the library.

The article has an interesting bibliographic review, and the discussion of the data and results is also quite interesting. The article also has a few interesting tables and data points. Among these:

• 23.4% of responding students read ebooks. Of those, 15.8% read on a dedicated ereader device. Roughly 4% of the total set of responding students owned a dedicated device.


• Students with dedicated e-readers were more than twice as likely to do 2/3rds to all of their reading on the device.


• Owners of ereaders were most likely to be reading recreational content on their ereaders, which is unsurprising given that most of these devices are oriented toward trade book reading. Owners of ereaders were more than twice as likely to read an ebook for recreational purposes than for class.


• Interestingly, those students without ebook readers were more likely to indicate that they read ebooks for class purposes. This group read ebooks for recreational content about the same amount as for class.


• Students who own an ereader overwhelmingly were most likely to purchase their ebooks from the "official" store associated with the device. Open access repositories and public libraries came in at a distant second and third place respectively, followed closely by online independent retailers.

The study contains some additional observations and data points of interest.

Chegg expands its engagement with students

In case you missed it. A couple weeks ago Chegg announced it was moving beyond books and launching a new site that also helps students to select courses and to receive homework help. The new ventures use technology that Chegg acquired last year when it purchased start-ups CourseRank and Cramster.

Many readers of this blog are probably familiar with Chegg for their book rental business which became a signficant driver for change in the business models in the higher education textbook market in recent years. The company also spun off Kno, which has been working on digital textbooks and a digital reader device.

Chegg's vision is to reach college students every day of the year. An ambitious challenge, but something stores ought to keep in mind in terms of managing their student relationships. As Chegg continues to branch out, stores should watch and learn. The company has some interesting ideas about engagement from which the industry could learn.

The Secret to Effective QR Codes

QR codes, those two-dimensional bar codes resembling tiny crossword puzzles, are popping up in a lot of places, including product tags and labels, ads, articles, posters, books, tickets, receipts, and more. QR stands for "quick response." It’s a relatively easy way for retailers, manufacturers, organizations, and others to connect their customers and members to additional information or resources online through their smartphones.

But, in order to be effective, the QR code must link to content that’s viewable on a smartphone and matters to the user. This article, reprinted on Ragan.com, a site for communications professionals, offers several practical considerations for setting up a QR code the right way.

QR codes initiated in manufacturing as a way of tracking parts making their way into various businesses. Today they have a far greater range of uses. In fact, I was at a conference this past week where QR codes were integrated into several aspects of the event. Here is a pair of short videos that helps explain QR codes and some of the business implications:

Pace for Mobile Apps on Campus Quickens

College students are going mobile, according to the Student Monitor 2010 spring survey of full-time undergraduate students at four-year colleges, which reports 98% of students have cellphones and nearly half of those phones are smartphones. Campuses are still in the catch-up mode with mobile applications, but the strides are getting quicker.

The 2010 Campus Computing Survey shows that an eighth of the campuses participating in the report have already launched a mobile learning management system (LMS) application. Another 10% are scheduled to have one before the end of the current academic year and nearly 25% of the institutions are starting to think about offering mobile apps.

“The campus interest in and movement to mobile apps reflects trends in the consumer market,” Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, said in the report. “Students expect their institutions to provide the kinds of resources and services they experience and enjoy as consumers. Mobile apps provide online access to instructional resources and campus services from the buttons on your smartphone.”

The Campus Computing Survey also reveals that IT officers on campus are coming around to accepting e-books as the wave of the future. Over four-fifths of respondents (86.5%) agree or strongly agree that “e-book content will be an important source for instructional resources in five years.” In addition, 78.6% agree that e-book readers will become important in classrooms for instructional content in five years.

E-textbook continues to lag behind used textbook titles because of development and pricing strategies for most students. But as the pace of mobile apps development accelerates, more and more students become accustomed to using them and provides a very promising future for the technology, according to Green.

The CITE's 1000th blog posting!

Welcome to the 1000th blog posting on The CITE and Thank You for coming!

This posting marks the 1000th blog entry on The CITE. The first posting, back on September 5, 2007, noted that this would be an experiment – posting occasional news stories, analysis, commentary, responses to questions, etc. The blog started out with a posting every 1-2 weeks. Somewhere around April 17, 2008 we decided that the blog had merit, and folks out there had interest and so the decision was made to commit. At that point we began to track traffic volume to the blog and thus I tend to look at April 17th as the blog’s birthday.

When we began tracking the volume of traffic to the blog, we had a few visitors a week. Today we have thousands -- more than 58,000 readers have visited the blog from 170 countries around the world. Thank you for coming, and coming back.

One of the very first postings on the blog announced the new Sony Reader. Not long after that, the Amazon Kindle was announced and that story too was covered here. EReaders have been a common theme on the blog ever since – and quite a few have come and gone over the past few years. In the last few years we have seen the devices come to some early maturity, at least on the trade book side, if not quite as much in textbooks. We have moved away from wide-scale experimentation to some dominant designs, and standards. The device wars have somewhat ended, with the platform wars just heating up. The iPad’s introduction last year represents the next generation of devices. Not quite an ereader, not quite a laptop. Some early projections suggested that the device would flop – being neither quite one nor the other, did it have a place? Apparently history will prove that it did.

Birthed with the first commercially viable ereaders, this blog too has grown over the past few years. With some occasional breaks, we try to get a posting up daily. Occasionally we have a couple spurts with two postings a day. I have a backlog of items to blog about that is well over 50 items deep. For a while Liz Hains helped convert many of these to blog hosting, for which I am appreciative. Since the start of the year, the NACS Publications team – including Cindy Ruckman, Michael von Glahn, Dan Angelo, and Dan Pender – have been very helpful and supportive by providing me with a couple postings each week. While comments on the blog have been few, I have received numerous emails over time, including a variety of suggestions and articles of interest.

I hope this blog has provided some insight (and occasionally useful advice) to those out there involved with course materials or print -- whether retailers, publishers, authors, educators, administrators, or students. The world is changing. Sometimes it seems that change is faster or slower than others. Change is coming, though, and hopefully this blog is serving to both signal and record some of that change, and generating some thought about what future roles and opportunities exist in the digital space. The revolution in ereaders, ebooks, digital content, and digital course materials has just begun. We will try to make the next 1000 posts informative, broad-based, and occasionally fun. Let’s see what the next three years brings!

Thanks for your time and interest.

M

Mobile learning and questioning the book metaphor

The current issue of EDUCAUSE Quarterly has an article of interest. The article asks why we should consider "pdf-equivalent" of the print book as the proper metaphor in creating digital course materials. Such close equivalents produce few, if any, notable improvements in student learning outcomes. The piece goes on to focus heavily on mobile pilot projects that have been going on at Abilene Christian University over the past three semesters.

The article's reported key takeaways were:

• Students have expectations for interactivity and connectedness when they use digital devices, yet these expectations are frequently unmet when using most digital textbooks, resulting in a lack of mass adoption.


• Visions of media-rich, cost-efficient educational texts available on a variety of digital devices seem frustratingly slow to solidify due to a wide range of factors, including failure to effectively exploit the pedagogical potential of mobile devices.


• Abilene Christian University and GYLO partnered to investigate student attitudes and perceptions of impact of using a mobile device app as a supplemental tool for teaching statistics.


• A series of pilot studies found a positive correlation between use of the app and perceptions of increased engagement and consequently higher grades in the course.

These findings mirror observations noted on this blog in the past, and noted in other studies. The focus and emphasis on mobile as an adoption factor in this particular study was interesting, in addition to its reinforcement of our already held beliefs as to why digital course materials fail to meet expectations on the sales side.

Truths for publishers are for retailers too

Last week the Teleread blog had a posting entitled, Three truths that publishers should try to understand about readers. The posting starts with the following observation:

The big shift that ebooks are bringing to the market is not necessarily the paper to pixels one—it’s the shift between the bookstore as customer and the reader as customer. The problem many print publishers seem to have today is that they don’t really understand who the reader is and what they want out of a purchasing experience.

An interesting statement -- for booksellers as much as publishers. The article goes on to discuss three truths for publishers. I will paraphrase those here, and recast for booksellers.

TRUTH 1: READERS DON’T REALLY CARE HOW PUBLISHING WORKS This is true, and the bookstore corollary is that the reader does not really care how the bookstore works either. Whether it is financial return which covers their financial aid, a book that is out-of-stock because the faculty member ordered it the day before class began, or a shortage of used texts because the publisher changed editions -- student consumers often do not care about your problems. They want their problem solved -- getting course materials required for a course in a usable format at the lowest cost. They do not want explanations or to be educated on difficulties with DRM, or publisher pricing models. To quote another passage:

When you find yourself seeing a reader comment and thinking ‘but there is actually a really good explanation for that!’ your response, publishers, should not be to try and educate this customer on why this baffling situation is actually just and right. It should be to recognize that you have a customer giving you input on what you need to fix in order to get their money.

That last line is particularly true of student consumers.

TRUTH 2: ‘FAIR PRICE’ IS A RELATIVE CONCEPT

We have yet to settle on what is a fair price for digital, and this is particularly true in the textbook space. Is it half the cost of new? Is it the same price as print? Are you buying the book, or just "digitally renting" it for a semester (publishers call this a subscription). Reader perception is that the digital should be much less than print because they believe the cost is in the paper and distribution, not in the content creation, editing, formatting, storage, etc.

Whereas education on what they are buying is mostly unnecessary with print books, with digital books the purchase is less clearly an easy option. Differing DRM which changes from one publisher, book, or platform to the next creates confusion. Differing definitions of what you can do with your digital book purchase can also vary, particularly with digital textbooks. What was once a simple purchase where you knew what you could do with the book, is now a complicated and often inferior acquisition experience from the point of the consumer.

With expectations set for a lower price and the experience being less than optimal, who would blame students for expecting ebooks to cost less?

TRUTH 3: DRM IS A RED HERRING

Again, a quote from the article is helpful here:

I get that piracy is an issue for you guys. Loss prevention is something that every business deals with. I understand trying to keep such losses minimal—you will always have a margin for this because every business does. But the best way to minimize these losses is to solve the problems that are causing actual, potential customers to turn away. And in that respect, DRM has become a bit of a red herring.

As the Teleread article goes on to note, there are other factors that are impacting sales of digital more than piracy, but publishers are so focused on illegal downloading that they miss the big picture. This is one of the big errors that the music industry made. They were so caught up in trying to define the business to consumers, that consumers turned to piracy to get what they wanted that the music industry was not providing. In the same way, by making DRM cumbersome, but not conquerable by those who really want to pirate content, they are driving students not to adopt digital options -- and in likely encouraging the piracy they hope to prevent.

Many years ago I was involved with a project where we observed that a number of individuals were more likely to break a particular law and pay the fine than adhere to the requirement. This is because adhering to the law was so complicated and costly. We used technology to make it easier and more cost effective for indviduals to comply, and surprise, surprise, legal compliance went way up.

The same is true with DRM -- if it is too difficult for students to acquire and use the content legally, then they will find other options from the legal (e.g., choosing not to purchase, going with print, etc.) to the illegal (e.g., piracy). Ignoring the problems with DRM drives away good customers who are willing to pay, and fosters more digital theft. It also encourages more faculty to consider open source solutions, which can have a price tag, yet still be DRM free. It is time we rethink content protection and business models, and retailers have as much stake in that outcome as publishers do.

Some final guiding thoughts... The truths and lessons for Publishers in the TeleRead piece have implications for retailers too. I have said it before, but do we really know what business we are in? Beyond that, do we know what our customers really want? Successful businesses solve problems for their customers. Do we know what our customers problems are, and are we trying to solve those problems? How could we solve those problems more efficiently or effectively? If we fail to do so, someone else will, and at that point it is not really fair on our part to complain about the competition. If the competition is viable, it is because they are providing something that the customer values, and their value proposition is greater than the one we offer. Just something to think about.

Aptara's second eBook survey of publishers

Aptara has released its next eBook survey of publishers. Among the reported key findings are:

• 64% of all publishers are offering titles in eBook format. Up 11% from the first survey.


• Only 7% of publishers are implementing enhancements to their eBooks, suggesting that most publishers are not aware of the EPUB standard’s inherent support for content enhancement, including audio and video.


• 61% of Trade/Consumer publishers support the EPUB eBook format standard. 18% more than any other publisher type.


• The greatest eBook production challenge is still eReader/content compatibility issues. Even with the near universal EPUB format standard, today's fragmented eReader market makes quality eBook production a moving target, requiring manual manipulation to retain consistent formatting across device-types.

More information can be found in the study report.

A new view on the CITE

Google now offers dynamic views -- allowing you, the readers, to view The CITE content in different ways. So if you are tired at looking at the blog in its current format, try taking a look at it using: thecite.blogspot.com/view You can select different types of views to see the content in different ways. One note -- the "snapshot" view will not work for this blog as we do not have a daily picture associated with posts. Also, to use the new dynamic views feature you must be using a newer browser, such as IE8. There is also a Google post where you can learn more about the different dynamic views.

CAMEX questions answered: publisher relations

This week marks the fourth week post CAMEX (yes, a month has passed already). Each Friday I am posting questions attendeess submitted to my session at that meeting. At my current rate of a few questions each Friday, I probably still have another two months worth of Friday postings before I have answered all of the questions. So if you are waiting for your question to be answered, feel free to drop me an email for a quick response, or keep coming back and I will get to all of the questions submitted. This week's question(s) relate to some publisher relations topics:

Q1. I have had trouble getting e-book versions of traditional textbooks from major publishers, but they will sell the e-version directly to students. How can we overcome this?

A. Are you talking directly to publishers for individual titles? That could be a challenge. Have you considered working with CourseSmart or a similar company who has the content? Or are you working with your POS provider and their program for e-books? The question has some gaps in it, making it a little difficult to fully answer. In general though, if the major publisher has the digital title being offered directly to students, the content is most likely available through other channels as well to which you may have access (e.g., your POS provider or CourseSmart), so at this point I would probably start there. Publishers are unlikely to serve up great volumes of digital content directly to stores because most stores are not equipped to directly handle the files and their security, and because if publishers did this for all titles across all campuses, it would quickly become somewhat unweildy. The best way for us to overcome this is to work as a channel to define common points of aggregation and common standards for accessing and managing the files. Our (NMS's) efforts with other groups (e.g., CCRA [Canada] and ICBA) is one example of an industry or channel-based initiative to address parts of this challenge. We refer to this initiative as DCP or Digital Content Platform.

Q2. Some publishers still take 6-8 weeks for POD titles. Can we/you influence them to decrease this time period?

A. By POD titles, I am assuming you mean custom titles -- or do you mean access to titles that you can use for in-store POD? Regardless, we (NMS) do have an initiative in this area which we hope will help to decrease some of the supply chain delays and inefficiencies. We are testing this out in an alpha phase currently, and plan to launch a set of defined pilots this summer as part of the beta phase. Assuming all works well with our initial test and the summer pilots, we plan to begin expanding our tests in Fall 2011 and widen the offering to more stores starting in 2012.

Q3. What or how is NMS working with publishers relating to platforms?

A. Well, the answer to that lies in the answers to the two questions above. We have several projects or efforts underway or being investigated. Our two main areas of interest are the digital content platform (DCP) and regional print-on-demand (R-POD). As these initiatives begin to move from pilot to production this year we will be providing stores with more information. The point is that we are working with publishers on content initiatives that cover both print and digital technologies.

ASU, Michigan Test Ways to Work with Digital Texts

Putting e-textbooks into the hands of faculty members may be an avenue to wider acceptance of digital course materials. A Campus Technology article highlights efforts at Arizona State University, Tempe, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to that end.

ASU adopted the CourseSmart Faculty Instant Access program, which allows instructors access to course material to review without waiting for delivery of the printed copy. The program also provides multiple text versions for faculty to consider through a cross-book searching function. Faculty can order e-textbooks through the school’s My ASU information portal and, as soon as an adoption has been made, the e-textbook is available for purchase through the CourseSmart web site.

In Ann Arbor, a working group made up of personnel from the library, Office of the Registrar, Information and Technology Services, and Instructional Support Services is testing a program that integrates digital titles directly into the university’s learning management system. The group is conducting surveys and focus groups to learn about student and instructor expectations and experiences with e-books throughout the semester, and then report to campus leaders on e-book implementation.

Additionally, users are able to access the digital material from any computer or browser-based mobile device. There are also iPhone and iPad apps, and users with vision disabilities can download customized versions.

Tablets for education

The tablet market continues to heat up with more devices getting announced that are specifically targeted toward education -- whether college or K-12. Reuters had an interesting article on this last month that covers a couple new devices heading toward the education space.

One of the new devices entering the space is from mySpark Technologies which has an Android-based tablet with a stylus and capabilities designed for textbooks. Rullingnet is introducing a device for toddlers(the Vinci Tab).

These devices will compete, of course, against existing players, such as Kno (which is rumored to have their hardware platform for sale), Entourage Edge (with its dual screen device), and, of course the iPad.

The Myth of Commercial Textbook Reliability

There was an interesting opinion piece on the College Open Textbook Blog this week. A former commercial textbook publishers talks about the quality standards, perceptions and motivations around textbooks--from both the OER and commercial perspectives.

An appropriate analogy which came to mind when reading the piece is the Encylopedia Brittanica versus Wikipedia. Many questioned the credibility and accuracy of Wikipedia (an open source encyclopedia) at first. I think the last stats I saw (some time ago) was that there are now fewer than three errors in Wikipedia for every error in Encyclopedia Brittanica -- and errors in the former tend to get corrected more quickly than errors in the latter.

I think the concern -- both with Wikipedia and open textbooks -- is not so much about small errors. It is more about authoritative voices and the vetting of content by authoritative voices. There is a fear (real or perceived) that content that is not vetted by field experts runs the risk of being inaccurate in fundamental ways -- e.g., excluding evolution as a valid scientific theory over or along side creationism in a biology textbook. Conventional wisdom (which is often wrong) or political agendas can more easily be embedded into texts if there is not a vetting process by trained or experienced experts within a field. Of course, some in the scientific or academic community might say this happens with traditional texts as well, because new, novel, or as yet unproven theories often have great difficulty getting published. Certainly there are examples in the open source space which address this concern around vetting content -- Flat World Knowledge and Connexions being two very positive examples.

Maybe we have to come to some agreement what we mean by "quality." That said, the opinion piece raises some interesting ideas and perspectives. Should open textbooks be held to a different standard? Probably not. One could ask if for-profit universities should be held to a different standard too -- with an equal amount of debate to follow. For a new technology to prove itself and be adopted in the marketplace is not an entitlement -- it must be earned. For open textbooks that means being held to a higher standard until perceptions and reality are aligned at a point favorable to the technology.

The open textbook community should welcome and embrace that higher bar as a challenge to create even better products -- exceeding the products produced by traditional sources. That in turn forces those traditional products to either improve or exit the marketplace. Remember that it is not always the best technology that wins--but often the technology that is able to capture the greatest amount of market share. For open source to be successful in the long term, the movement must focus on continuing to build market share. Part of that will happen by demonstrating open source meets a higher standard than traditional textbooks, if such is the case.

Publishers Invest in Inkling’s Textbook Solution

Matt MacInnis, co-founder and CEO of e-book publishing startup Inkling, was quoted at length in this Campus Technology article on why the e-textbook market lags so far behind the e-book market. Now there’s news that his firm has taken another step in addressing the issue.

Publishers Weekly reported that the San Francisco-based firm, which creates interactive textbooks specifically for the Apple iPad, recently secured “multimillion dollar” investments from McGraw-Hill and Pearson. Inkling plans to produce electronic versions of the textbooks from the two publishers for the popular Apple device in the Inkling multimedia platform.

Inkling will have access to the top 100 undergraduate textbooks from McGraw-Hill and 24 of the most popular business and arts and sciences titles from Pearson, along with medical books from Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. Inkling already has agreements to reproduce titles from a number of major education publishers, such as John Wiley & Sons and W.W. Norton.

This partnership is one of many efforts that are trying to reinvent the textbook. The industry also continues to look for possible ways to reduce the cost for students. All the various efforts feature online access, customizable content, selling the content in smaller units such as chapters, class and instructor notes that are easy to circulate, video and animation, and the reach on multiple devices.

Research Shows Strong Support for Educational Technology

A Clarus Research Group survey commissioned by Cisco shows that most educational leaders worldwide support technology in education. The study interviewed administrators and IT decision-makers in 14 countries.

The research revealed that the majority see the potential in technology addressing student concerns, such as employment prospects, distance education, and research capabilities. In the study, 86% of respondents agreed there was a need for programs to develop teamwork skills among students, while 85% believe the role of technology in student participation is increasing.

In addition, 83% consider technology important in preparing students for employment in a global economy and that it must be incorporated into curriculum. While most respondents see technology as a way to reduce cost, the majority also list online security as a main concern.

E-Text Rules Matter in Cal State Study

Preliminary findings from a California State University study on e-textbooks has shown that students’ acceptance of the electronic material often depended on the rules publishers set on its usage. The rules, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, include the number of pages a student can print from the e-textbook, whether it can be downloaded to a desktop, or used online.

The pilot program last fall involved more than 3,800 students in 30 course sections where e-textbooks were assigned with thousands more in a control group using traditional course materials. The results have been mixed. A third of the 662 students who responded expressed satisfaction with the e-textbook experience, one third said they were neutral, and the final third were dissatisfied, according to the study, which was reported on by Converge Magazine.

The study also showed 73% of students assigned e-textbooks bought the course material, compared to 46% of students in traditional courses who bought the book. Officials from the study believe the lower cost of the e-text led to the increase in digital book purchases.

Project leaders plan to share the findings with publishers in hopes those publishers will change policies to respond to the student concerns. The companies participating in the study during the fall semester were Cengage Learning, Pearson, Macmillian, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley and Sons, and CourseSmart.

Proposed Google Book Search Settlement Rejected

The long-awaited decision on the Google Book Search settlement came out this week, with Judge Chin rejecting the current proposal. If you recall, this is the case involving the Author's Guild and their claims of copyright infringement resulting from Google's mass scanning of library content. The story is expected to get wide-spread coverage this week. For example, see the Wall Street Journal article from yesterday afternoon.

In his decision, Judge Chin wrote:

While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the [Amended Settlement Agreement (ASA)] would simply go oo far. It would permit this class action—which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of “snippets” for on-line searching—to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.

The question now is, "What's next?" The judge did indicate that switching from opt-out to opt-in would resolve many of the concerns. That certainly would help for books in print, and perhaps even for many of the books out of print, but what about the many orphan works that exist? Secondarily, what does this mean for bookstores signing up with Google Editions? Or more generally, what does it mean for Google?

Ohio textbook affordability initiative update

Later this week there will be a webinar providing an e-textbook update on the Ohio Digital Bookshelf Project as part of the state's textbook affordability initiative. Steve Acker from OhioLink will be the presenter. Here is a summary of the webinar:

In Year 1 of the Ohio Digital Bookshelf Project, five major publishers made their Introductory Psychology textbook available in digital form at a discount from print of 70%. In Year 2, the disciplines of Accounting, Biology, and Economics will be added and aggressive efforts to bring more librarians, instructional designers, and accessibility experts into the community will be undertaken.

The three strands of the Ohio Digital Bookshelf Project’s "DNA" are (1) working with traditional textbook publishers, (2) engaging in open educational resources initiatives, and (3) supporting digital literacy workshops and programs for both faculty and students reaching toward “personalized learning environments.” Each of these strands is connected and will interoperate as the learning materials environment evolves over the next five years. Traditional publishers will adapt to the OER movement, which will continue to change as an alternative to current practices. Faculty and students will continue to develop “personalized learning environments” for collecting, packaging and using content to serve individualized learning needs.

To register or learn more, go to www.teachuohio.org

Are There Apps for Retailers?

The Chronicle of Higher Education’s ProfHacker blog recently posted a lengthy list of productivity applications recommended by some of its regular contributors and participants at the recent THATCamp-Southeast (The Humanities and Technology Camp). Some are free, some not. While several are geared more toward managing academic materials, most would come in handy for anybody interested in better organizing their documents and downloads.

Are any useful productivity tools out there that campus retailers should know about? Store buyers and managers, what computer and smartphone applications are you using to help run your businesses more efficiently and effectively? Share your favorites in the comments.

CAMEX questions answered: Open learning/access

This week's question from CAMEX is about open learning or open access course materials. For the short and direct answer to the question, read only the first paragraph. For the longer and more complete answer, read the full text.

Q. How much impact will I expect from the open learning component of digital delivery?

A. My expectation is that open access course materials (OACM) will grow to probably 10% of the course material market over the next several years. However, as with much of the digital movement, the focus is on the largest textbook adoptions where the impact will be greatest. That means the spread of open access textbooks could affect college store revenues -- which in turn translates into an impact on the financial aid and student services budgets on many campuses.

As an anecdotal example, I heard from one community college yesterday where the administration was apparently surprised by the financial impact that occured to the store's contributions to the institution's budget this spring when some faculty moved their large textbook adoptions to an OACM option. We heard a similar story last year from another large university where the move of one of their largest textbook adoptions to a free, online OACM option had a net impact of close to US$1M on the financial aid budget. OACM is likely here to stay, and so campus administrations should begin to plan for that to have some financial impact.

The open access movement has some strengths and weaknesses. On the strength side, it is an active approach to reducing the cost of course materials. Like the dot-com and real-estate bubbles before it, the textbook and tuition bubbles cannot keep going up forever. At some point these bubbles will pop and the models will have to change. The OACM movement, whether by design or accident, will focus greater attention on the interconnection between these two bubbles. The supporters of the OACM movement have been very vocal, aggressive, and active in getting changes in legislation and grant support. They have been very good as a movement in getting their point heard and supported. Unfortunately, this is not always done with accurate information.

On the weakness side, much of the OACM movement has yet to prove itself as sustainable over the long term. Will grant money and federal support continue forever? Again, while there are very notable exceptions, much of the movement has challenges with quality control and accessibility for students with disabilities. The latter is a challenge for several segments of the digital course materials movement and not just OACM. Hopefully some of the grant and federal dollars put into OACM will focus on developing more long-term sustainability models and not just short term textbook replacements. This is an area where the college store community could and should contribute and actively participate.

The OACM movement has produced some wins for nearly all parties -- reducing cost of course materials, while producing some quality course materials and revenue opportunities. Do not forget, while companies like FlatWorld are frequently held up as the "poster child" for OACM, they are still a for-profit company and have at least some expectation of building a business model that will be at least self-sustaining if not profitable.

With all of the above in consideration, NACS and the college store community -- particularly but not exclusively in the community college space -- have been serving a positive role in supporting the open access course material movement. Here are a few examples, which is only a small set of our industry’s activity in this area:

• The NACS board formally adopted a policy statement in support of the OACM movement more than two years ago.

• We have initiatives within NACS, and its subsidiary NACS Media Solutions, that have specifically focused on helping the open access movement become more sustainable by making it easier to distribute those materials through the college store channel. As one example, we conducted a pilot with FlatWorld Knowledge last semester, and are expanding our efforts to include other open access course material providers.

• As recently as last week we highlighted one of our community college store directors who has actively encouraged faculty on his campus to consider and adopt open access course materials and other options to reduce textbook prices.

• At CAMEX this year, our annual educational event, we had at least four sessions that directly addressed open access course materials and provided stores with information on how to get involved.

It is the mission of most college stores to provide students with all course materials required to be successful in the classroom, regardless of whether or not those course materials are free. Many college stores work very hard to reduce the cost of textbooks for students. This is information stores MUST get better at communicating to both their internal and external communities.

If you have not seen it, you should take a look at EDUCAUSE's recent "7 things you should know about..." piece on open access course materials. Initially it contained a factual error regarding bookstores, which has subsequently been corrected. I raise this point because college stores collectively have not been good in communicating what they are doing with open access course materials and that can lead to inaccurate understanding of the role we play and the things we do to try to reduce course material costs for students.

Phones Getting into Class, One Way or Another

During class, most college professors would prefer students refrained from even glancing at their phones. But some profs are beginning to find ways to incorporate smartphone apps into their instruction.

As this article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch describes, a faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University has created phone apps for local walking tours that take students right to the scene of the history they’re studying—Edgar Allan Poe’s haunts and Civil War sites, among others. Another VCU prof was taken aback when his students continued discussions via Twitter for two months after the course concluded.

According to the article, a VCU survey discovered 43% of students used mobile devices, not computers, as their chief means of accessing the Internet. When they need to check something online, they do it right where they are from their phone—no waiting until they get back to the dorm to fire up their laptop.

Another tidbit from the VCU survey: Almost two-thirds of VCU’s first-year students own smartphones. That percentage will almost certainly be much higher with next fall’s new freshman class.

Learning from Amazon

BNet had an interesting piece a couple months ago on 6 ecommerce strategies Amazon uses that other retailers should adopt. Most of these effect discoverability of the store's products within search engines -- part of SEO or search engine optimization strategies. (Yes, yet another type of technology-based strategy with real business implications for you to think about). No surprises in the list from the article, but something for stores to think about as they evaluate their own e-commerce tools:

1. Let your customers help keep your website fresh
2. Get more control over your listings in Google
3. Win on long-tail key phrases
4. Make it easy to find things
5. Personalize the experience
6. Anticipate customers' questions

All good topics and strategies to improve customer engagement (#1), improve visibility to customers (#2-4), and improve the customer experience (#4-6).