LIR Annual Seminar
The Future of the Textbook
Marketplace
Paul Harwood
JISC Collections
25th March 2011
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For journals, it all seemed so easy to get from A to B..
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For books, the journey has not been so
straightforward..
• Struggles to find appropriate business models
• Publishers not making all their content digitally
available
• Libraries’ budget restrictions and historic commitment
to protect the journals budget
• Despite a slow start, the e-book market is now very
fast moving and subject to change
• Different types of book and different types of
container
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On that note, Esposito is helpful..
• The Institutional Book
• The Classic E-book
• The Enhanced Book
• The Muscular Book
• The Social Book
• The Staccato Book
Joe Esposito: E-books and their containers. The
Scholarly Kitchen, Jan 18th, 2011
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My talk today will focus on how publishers are
developing textbooks for students and lecturers and
implications for the library
• Because without a focus on a certain type of
‘container’ it is difficult to do anything other than a
surface analysis
• Because I’ve done some work recently in this area
• Because I think textbooks will change dramatically
over the next few years
• Because I think they present libraries with an
interesting challenge
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Definitions, market places, market size, key players
• Key learning tools in the education and higher
education sectors, sectors where teaching practices
and learning styles have evolved slowly
• A $10bn industry
• The concept of adoption and market differences
• In the UK: one institution’s core text is another’s
supplementary reading
• Textbook market in the UK, is around £200m
• Cengage, Pearson, McGraw-Hill, Palgrave are key
players (CourseSmart)
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The evolving textbook marketplace
Hybrid
product: print
text and CD
ROM
Complementary
product: digital
textbook
Traditional Print
Textbook
Replacement
product:
enhanced digital
textbook
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Replacement
product: Open
Source textbook
Replacement
product: Publisher
proprietary
solution
| Slide 8
The pace of change is relatively slow because.....
• Teaching practice and learning styles have evolved
slowly
• Compared with B2B publishing and STM, education
markets have been digital laggards (16% of total
revenues generated from digital products compared
with 36% for B2B and 69% for STM
• Students still value a print version of their textbooks
for marking-up etc
•Outsell predicts a 25% growth for the digital textbook
market between 2010 and 2012 whilst the print market
will decline by around 1% during the same period
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Key trends
• Proprietary publisher offerings (course materials
accompanying textbooks)
• Textbook rental (Chegg)
• Open Source textbooks
• Customisation
• Devices
• Embedding into learning workflows
• Price sensitivity/student expectations
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| Slide 11
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| Slide 12
Rental
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| Slide 14
Open
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| Slide 15
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Customisation
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Devices!
• Proliferation
• Which, if any, will dominate?
• For publishers, this means being
device agnostic
• Standards
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Aggregating content - CourseSmart
• Original aims and objectives: a tool for
evaluation purposes
• Now: an attempt to create a marketplace where
students can buy e-textbooks
• USPs:
- Price (50% of the price of print versions)
- Accessibility: anytime/anywhere
- Functionality: copy/paste, mark-up, print
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Now includes content from 14 publishers
including founding partners: Cengage,
McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Wiley, Bedford,
Freeman & Worth
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Bookshops?
Sales & Marketing?
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25
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| Slide 26
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| Slide 27
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Textbook and course materials
Digital developments
 Lots happening – new services, announcements,
developments
 Lines becoming blurred between online learning and digital
textbooks
 Developments by publishers, suppliers (e-Learning, Learning
Management Systems, VLEs) and also academics
 Lots of jargon: “Collaboration tools”; “class management functionality”;
“course content delivery platforms”; “multi-dimensional teaching
experience”; “interactive classroom experience”; “online learning tools”
 Services not only for students but also teaching staff. Some
may purely be for managing the learning process, rather
than access to content
 More customisation of textbooks, particularly by teaching
staff
 Open access textbooks
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29Apportioning of Costs
Teaching staff
 Services from publishers and learning management suppliers
increasingly for teaching staff.
–
Course / syllabus preparation,
–
Setting assignments
–
Course management tools
–
Allowing customising of textbooks
 Many university departments are approaching publishers directly to licence
textbook content. Several publishers reported that such approaches were on the
increase, and one publisher estimated that 20-30% of UK higher education
institutions are now buying textbook content in this way.
 Academic staff creating their own e-textbooks
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Learning management systems
 Students and instructors use an LMS to share course materials, calendars,
notes, links, syllabi, opinions, assignments and now, textbook content.
 Follett Higher Education Group, the college bookstore operator, is leading an
effort to make e-textbooks fully interoperable with learning management
systems (LMS). Follett became the first to demonstrate this interoperability
by sharing professors' textbook notes through the Moodle standards-based
LMS
 Instructors can now make notes in Follet’s CafeScribe® digital textbooks
and click to place the notes in a learning management system for students'
immediate access, said Bryce Johnson, Follett's director of eTextbook
solutions.
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VLEs

VLEs are playing an increasingly important role in terms of e-textbook provision within
higher education institutions in the future

OUP: “A VLE 'cartridge' refers to a downloadable file that comprises VLE content. It is
a package of all the lecturer and student materials from a single textbook's Online
Resource Centre available on the OUP website. It enables lecturers to import all the
content from one Online Resource Centre into their VLE at once. Lecturers need first
to adopt the related textbook.

Strathclyde University: “Staff who are using a VLE may well want to encourage
students to explore a wide background of library funded information resources. This is
particularly important if staff wish to avoid the trap in which the information immediately
offered to the class, within the tightly defined virtual space of the learning environment,
becomes the only information that VLE-based students ever see.”

How do libraries engage with this environment?
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The Future?
O’Reilly, The Future of Digital Textbooks, Tools of Change
Conference, Feb 2010:

Lines are becoming blurred between online Learning and digital textbooks and between
producers and consumers of content.

Interactive learning on the Internet offers a mix of free and fee-based models, for public
good and private profit

An increasing number of faculty and students are using mobile devices for collaboration and
communications.
Features of future electronic textbook:

We’ll read it on a device that combines facets of the cell phone, iPOD, Kindle, flip camera
and laptop, with multimedia capabilities

As more books become scanned and digitized, links between digital documents will
strengthen their usage and legitimization, making it ever easier to follow the bread crumbs of
knowledge

Books will be cross-linked, clustered, indexed, annotated, remixed, and “mashed-up”—
combined in new combinations with video, animations, and audio
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Thank you for your attention
p.harwood@jisc-collections.ac.uk
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