Ebook readers work well for pleasure reading, but need some improvements in usability before they will be able to replace textbooks on a widespread basis. The potential cost-savings are more limited than most people expect.
I am an early adopter of technology and gadgetry. I purchased two Sony PRS-500 Readers when they first became available: one for my wife and one for me. We replaced them with the Kindle 2 earlier this year. I also own a Kindle DX and the Kindle application for the iPod Touch.
(I have not, however, tried ebook readers from other competitors to the Kindle such as Irex and Plastic Logic, or the Sony Reader Touch Edition or Sony Reader Daily Edition. I expect that the touchscreen adds a more natural page-turning experience, like the iPod Touch application, but also has the same problems with fingerprints.)
These devices are great for pleasure reading. It is possible to achieve total immersion in the text, even on the small screen of the iPod Touch. They are lightweight and have a large capacity so you can carry hundreds of books with you. I often read books on the Kindle on airplanes (except during takeoff and landing when the flight attendants insist on turning off anything with an on/off switch).
Amazon has also made it very easy to buy books. The wireless download and the streamlined bookstore help feed our addiction to reading. We're buying and reading twice as many books with the Kindle compared to the Sony Reader or previous print purchases. Amazon brings the bookstore to you, making it more convenient to buy books.
Kindle DX as an Etextbook Reader
But there are still a few problems with using an ebook reader as a textbook replacement, which may interfere with widespread adoption. The Kindle DX comes closest to solving these problems so far.
The Kindle DX has a high resolution full-size screen display with native PDF support, which is important for textbooks and a much-needed improvement. The higher resolution is very easy on the eyes, as readable as print publication. I don't find the page-turning flicker to be much of an annoyance, one quickly gets used to it. But the Kindle doesn't support as many alternate ebook formats as the Sony Reader and the larger format still has a sluggish screen refresh. Converting and transferring documents to the Kindle is a little inconvenient. It would be better if there were a "print to Kindle" option or if the email transfer were free.
Color would also be beneficial since some textbooks use it to good effect in diagrams and charts. But I don't think the lack of support for color will make or break the adoption of etextbooks.
Note-Taking Limitations
Note-taking capabilities are main problem with using the Kindle DX with electronic textbooks. Most people can type at a rate of 20-40 words per minute, even hunt and peck typists. Proficient typists can reach speeds of 60 to 100 words per minute or more. On the Kindle the speed drops to 15 words per minute (20 words per minute using a personal shorthand), with the sluggish screen update quite annoying. Even the thumb keyboard on a Blackberry is faster. Contrast that with the 20 to 40 words per minute speed of handwriting on paper, and you can see why many people will still prefer print textbooks. Most people speak and read at about 150 to 200 words per minute, so even handwriting is slower than the speed of thought. The Kindle DX is just not sufficiently effective for taking notes in class in real time.
When I was in college I found that transcribing my notes nightly was an effective approach to improving my comprehension of the material. It also helped because my handwriting became unreadable after it fermented for a few days. Even with the Kindle DX I would still want to take notes on paper and transcribe them later. Perhaps Amazon could provide tools for reading and annotating etextbooks online?
The annotation software on the Kindle also lacks maturity when it comes to highlighting passages of text, cross-referencing other documents, making notes in the margin or flipping through dog-eared pages of the text. You also can't draw diagrams or arrows pointing to particular passages. There's no facility for sharing notes with other students.
The Kindle has yet to take full advantage of the opportunities for interactivity. For example, an etextbook could include interactive end-of-chapter exercises and tests and dynamically provide supplemental content as needed to enhance student understanding.
Lack of Static Page Numbers
The lack of static page numbers on the Kindle makes it more difficult to cite sources or coordinate reading assignments. The Kindle needs to have a means for displaying and jumping to a static page number in addition to the location numbers. The length of location numbers makes them a little less convenient to enter. While the concept of a page changes depending on the font size and formatting, one could still report a static page number for a given "page" of text by identifying the static page number associated with the first word on the page. Page numbers do not need to have a one-to-one mapping to be useful.
Cost Savings
The cost of printing a book on paper is a small part of the cost of publishing a book, typically less than 10% of the total price. More than half the list price of a book goes to the distributors and booksellers, who often offer slight discounts. Authors get 5% to 10%, with publishers retaining the rest.
So the real savings from electronic textbooks will not come from eliminating paper, but by cutting out the middlemen. (Eliminating paper, however, does provide a net benefit to the environment if you read more than a dozen ebooks a year.) Textbook publishers will be able to cut prices in half by selling direct to consumers. However, this savings will be more apparent than real, since students cannot sell the etextbooks back to the college bookstore at the end of the semester to recoup some of the cost. Some publishers will program the etextbooks to self-destruct after an expiration date, providing the equivalent of textbook rental. (If the etextbook evaporates, what happens to the student's notes?)
Publishers will also save money because etextbooks can be delivered on demand instead of requiring minimum print runs to be economical. This will enable the publication of niche textbooks in smaller quantities.
Ultimately etextbooks will enable publishers to become more profitable by eliminating the used textbook marketplace and by cutting costs. This will encourage more publishers to offer electronic versions of their textbooks. A critical mass of textbooks is essential for widespread adoption of etextbook readers like the Kindle DX. (The Kindle DX is also useful for business documents.) There may be some cost savings for consumers (probably a little better than breakeven), but most of the benefit will be realized by publishers. Competition from ebook readers with open formats, however, may help drive down prices.
Etextbook readers like the Kindle DX will also facilitate self-publication. Professors will be able to publish their own textbooks at lower cost directly to students and still earn a bigger profit. They will also be able to put together seamless custom collections of papers and book chapter excerpts with added commentary.
Section 112 of the Higher Education Opportunity Act of 2008 (P.L. 110-315) mandated a variety of disclosures about textbooks, such as the inclusion of ISBN numbers in course syllabi and the availability of alternate less expensive formats. While this puts pressure on colleges and publishers to reduce costs, it does not otherwise facilitate the adoption of etextbooks.
More Resources:
Mark Kantrowitz is a nationally-recognized expert on student financial aid, student loans, scholarships and paying for college. He is the publisher of FinAid.org, the leading free web site for student aid information, advice and tools, and FastWeb.com, the most popular free scholarship matching web site.
If you think this infringes on your copyright, contact us.
Comments
Sort by:
The lack of color WILL make or break the adoption of etextbooks. If you can't get all of your textbooks on the device, then the cost savings is marginal (as well as the idea that you can use only one reader for four or more years). Other issues such as insurance, etc., have all been worked out with laptops and still need to be worked out with ebook readers. And, none of the major textbook publishers are on board yet with publishing on the Kindle because of its lack for online homework support. The lack of static page numbers is a hassle, and the page size makes the Kindle appropriate only for classes that use smaller textbooks.
In short, we're a long way away from this one. Look for Apple's iTablet to be the first serious contender in this market, because it will be able to embed online homework and track how much a student has read.
Is this helpful?
Yes(5)
No(8)
Permalink | Abuse
Mark Kantrowitz replied about a month ago
The Kindle DX has a 9.7" display (measured diagonally), compared with the 6" display of the Kindle. That's large enough for most textbooks. The only exception is 8.5x11 size workbooks, which entail an 11.1" diagonal if one assumes 1" margins. Only folio and quarto size books may be too big for the Kindle DX. Most textbooks are octavo.
Amazon currently lists more than 32,000 books available on the Kindle in the textbooks category. Many are novels that are used in literature courses, but some are real textbooks. For example, I found more than 750 calculus textbooks available for the Kindle.
Amazon's listing of 32,000 digital textbooks certainly is impressive, but adoption and student choice are normally more important than availability. In your example, your choice of calculus is particularly relevant. Stewart's Calculus is by far the most chosen college-level calculus text, and is priced at $134.72 in the Kindle store. That's only $30 less than the new textbook, which retails for around $168. I find it hard to believe a student would choose the version they couldn't sell back for at least $40 more than the cost of a used version of Stewart's text, which sells for around $100 on Amazon currently. And keep in mind that none of these include access to Enhanced WebAssign, Cengage's online homework platform for calculus.
New printed text: $168 (can resell, likely for $50 or more)
Used printed text: $100 (can resell, likely for $50 or more)
Kindle text: $134
eBook provided by Cengage: ~$100
iChapter provided by Cengage: $8.99 per chapter
Anyone in calculus can do that math, and the availability of two other digital options pushed by the publisher will only make digital competition more fierce for a relatively small market share.
Furthermore, the format size of Stewart's text is 10.1" by 8.7", requiring at least an 11" diagonal screen to display the content in the same style as the print text. With more and more textbooks shifting to two-page spreads (especially in the Sciences), that continues to hamper the presentation of electronic content, not to mention the fact that most publishers continue to develop primarily for print and then adapt this to digital. Trigsted's College Algebra, published by Pearson, is a prime example of a text produced first and foremost for digital learning, but this is only available through MyMathLab, which requires a PC or Mac.
All of this speaks to the fact that the cash cows in the textbook industry are in mathematics, the sciences, nursing, law, and professional studies. Perhaps Aspen or LexisNexis would be better suited for promoting a shift to digital in law schools than Cengage or Pearson, but their emphasis on journals and online content makes things difficult as well.
In short, this problem is far from solved -- I fully agree with the first paragraph in your post: "Ebook readers work well for pleasure reading, but need some improvements in usability before they will be able to replace textbooks on a widespread basis. The potential cost-savings are more limited than most people expect."
Is this helpful?
Yes(3)
No(5)
Permalink | Abuse
Mark Kantrowitz replied about a month ago
Let's consider the cost of the Stewart book from three different perspectives: student, publisher and bookstore (Amazon).
From a student perspective the net cost of a new textbook after reselling it on the used market is $168 - $50 = $118, about $16 less than the cost of buying the Kindle version of the textbook, which they get to keep. Is keeping the textbook worth the extra $16? That depends on the individual. Probably both the publisher and bookstore are experimenting with the pricing to see if they can maintain a premium on the digital edition. As adoption of etextbooks becomes more widespread beyond early adopters, the pricing will probably come down.
From the publisher's perspective, the publisher does not earn any income from used textbook sales. Used textbooks account for about 1/3 of textbook sales. Let's assume that for a popular textbook like Stewart there's a 1:1 ratio of new to used. So the extextbook version potentially lets the publisher (and bookstore) double sales. After Amazon's 55% cut, 10% author royalties and 10% production/marketing costs, the publisher nets $43 on the digital edition and $54 on the print edition. Selling two etextbooks yields $86 in revenue, $32 more than one copy of the print edition. Clearly the publisher could afford to knock up to $20 more off the digital edition and still earn more revenue as for the print edition.
From the bookstore's perspective, of the $171 new price for the digital edition, Amazon's cut is $94. They use $36 of this to discount the price to $134, yielding a net profit to Amazon of $58. Contrast this with the print version, where list price is $214, Amazon's cut is $118, Amazon uses $46 to discount the price to $168, yielding a net profit to Amazon of $72. So if the etextbook version has double the sales, they will get 2 x $58 = $116, $44 more than what they would get from selling just one new textbook. But Amazon also sells used copies of Stewart through the Amazon marketplace starting at $100 to $150. They charge a 15% commission on used textbooks, so Amazon nets $15 to $23 from used textbook sales. (Clearly, students can earn more by reselling the textbooks on Amazon than through their local campus bookstore.) So Amazon is getting $21 to $29 more from the etextbook version. Depending on actual ratios, this might turn out to be a wash, or it might mean that Amazon could afford to knock the Kindle price down to $140.
So, overall, the pricing of the etextbook could be lower by enough to make the etextbook version no more expensive than buying the print version and reselling it at the end of the year. A lot depends on whether the consumer wants to minimize costs by reselling the used textbook. If the consumer wants to keep the textbook, the etextbook edition is cheaper. If the consumer wants the cheapest possible solution, the print edition is cheaper.
If the publisher were able to sell directly to the consumer, that would cut the price significantly, enough so that etextbook editions would be clearly advantageous. But the Kindle only permits seamless sales through Amazon. It doesn't permit third-party sales of copy-protected works. Until publishers start marketing their own etextbook reader, there won't be a really significant pricing advantage for students who are focused solely on minimizing net costs.
When there is more competition among etextbook readers and their adoption is more widespread, I think the digital editions will dominate because an etextbook reader can be used for more than just reading textbooks. Also, there are several instability points in the current pricing models that could be exploited by competitors (e.g., give away the reader for free to maintain a lock on book sales to the consumer, charge the same price for the reader but undercut on the price of the books by 10% to 20%, develop a better textbook than Stewart and cut the price enough to make up the difference in improved marketshare).
Incidentally, the digital edition of Stewart has been optimized for the Kindle DX, meaning that it has been reformatted to fit the Kindle DX screen.
When it comes to the adoption of eTextbooks, student choice is the driving factor. At the end of the day, there is currently no compelling reason for students to choose an eTextbook over a standard textbook.
1. eBooks can't be sold back, and any student whose parents pay for their books looks forward to that extra cash at the end of the semester. You mention that Amazon only allows seamless sales and not third-party sales, but if they could become allow students to resell their licenses back to Amazon that would be interesting.
2. eBook readers are simply a digital replacement of the middleman that already exists -- the conventional bookstore. Conentional bookstores normally provide a not-insignificant amount of revenue to the schools they service. These bookstores, and thus the institutions, stand to lose the most in the conversion to digital. Publishers are shifting to institutional deals to create profit sharing arrangements to fill this gap; to my knowledge, Amazon does not cut institutions in on their profits, and even if they did, their bread and butter is cutting into margins so deep that people choose to purchase online instead of in the bookstore. Raising prices online would only push students back into the conventional bookstore, where returns aren't a hassle. If a student drops a course, they can immediately walk to the bookstore and get a refund for their book. On Amazon this is not necessarily the case, and would require going to the post office, shipping, and waiting if it were.
3. eBook readers are not yet truly interactive, hampering their ability to provide audio and video that many textbooks provide through companion websites currently. The digital ink technology that guarantees such long battery life is the very reason this has yet to occur. The lack of a seamless environment where the student can read and interact with their text keeps the eBook from really making a splash.
4. Publishers make 100% of the profits when selling through their own online websites, making these sites the first choice for the textbook salesman to push on campus. Keep in mind that each of the major publishers has a number of people vested in keeping the highest percentage of profit on the publisher's side. Editors fear eBooks because instead of earning a large amount of sales in the first semester of a new book and taking in a large bonus, their sales are split between print and online, and since the online textbook is always cheaper than the print book sales in that first semester will be lower than if the book was completely sold in print. Textbook salesmen do not trust that they will receive sales credit for books sold on Amazon, and the economics of the conventional bookstore (with publisher returns and sales credit for re-buys) mean that is where they spend their attention.
5. Weight is less of a factor in college than in grade school, where books are carried one off to each class versus all at once in a backpack to school each day.
I found your instability points particularly interesting -- giving away the reader for free, for instance, if a student bought one semester's worth of textbooks all in digital format could hook them indefinitely. I'm unfamiliar with the economics of the eReaders themselves, so I'm not sure how much lower than the current cost of the reader Amazon could go, but giving it away or reducing the cost could be a solution to seize more market share for digital. Developing a better textbook than Stewart is a tough challenge, and there are a number of alternatives out there, but until there is a total package of textbook + online homework + student supplements + teacher supplements available outside of the major publishers, this will be a particularly large challenge. Foundations are doing this in a one-off fashion at a number of schools, sponsoring the development of cheaper textbooks, but again this isn't a perfect solution either. If those efforts could be brought together onto a single development and distribution platform, that would go a long way. MITOpenCourseware possibly?
Selling directly to the consumer is also a great idea, but the prices are not low enough online to make a difference, and textbook rental programs have filled that gap at many schools. Besides, simply lowering the price of an online textbook is only going to start a price war that pushes publishers towards the bottom. In the end, it's all a waiting game. Publishers know that professors need what they have, and students are forced to buy the book the professor chooses. The internet has definitely shifted student buying behavior, and online homework will continue to do so, but the Kindle will not likely be the eReader of choice. Maybe the Kindle EX?
Is this helpful?
Yes(5)
No(6)
Permalink | Abuse
Ugh! No. I am showing my age (and possible geekdom) with pride to reminisce about the thrill I got going to the campus bookstore every semester to purchase textbooks. The feel of the weight of the volume, the underlining of passages or words that meant something only to me and helped jog my memory during course reviews. All this would be lost with an electronic text in a plastic wedge that looks like an overgrown video game box. By the end of a semester, a textbook shows the personality of the student. An e-book is steadfastly anonymous; impersonal. I don't even read e-books for pleasure; I hope the fad for students doesn't catch on, either.
Is this helpful?
Yes(0)
No(1)
Permalink | Abuse
Post Comment