eReaders & the future of textbook publishing

Reprinting an article that appeared in The Assignment Report September 2009 edition with kind permission. The publisher, Ed Tranham, asked me to do a thought-piece on the impact that eReaders are going to have on the world of education, and textbook publishing in particular:

Amazon’s Kindle eReader device has generated plenty of headlines this year predicting the imminent demise of printed books. With an estimated 1.2m Kindles sold, and $1bn annualised Kindle eBook sales, Amazon certainly does seem to have found something that consumers want.

So when the magazine-sized Kindle DX device launched in May, much was made of a partnership with Cengage, Pearson and Wiley (joined in August by McGraw Hill) offering certain HE titles in Kindle format for a trial starting this Autumn with six US colleges including Princeton. The aim is to cut the financial and environmental cost of paper textbooks. However, this experiment seems doomed to failure.

Nobody doubts that the days of paper textbooks are numbered (although they will equally certainly enjoy many twilight years). However, the idea that simply recreating paper texts as electronic versions is going to revolutionise learning is an absurdity. The major textbook publishers realise that the future lies in harnessing the multi-media and interactivity of the internet to evolve textbooks into integrated teaching and learning solutions. Pearson’s MyLabs, Wiley Plus and McGraw Hill’s Connect point the way as examples of VLE’s (virtual learning environments), combining eBook text access with multimedia enrichment, online exercises with real-time assessment, tracking for both students and instructors, annotation tools for note-taking and revision, customisation tools for instructors, and some level of integration with college-wide LMS’s. This is a powerful combination of benefits, with significant development costs. However, these exciting web-enhanced textbooks are also proving slow to take off. While there could be several reasons for this, I would assert that the idea of paper textbooks being replaced by students reading on a laptop (or netbook) screen is itself as flawed as the Kindle DX pilot. Why? Because traditional computer screens are simply inferior to paper in terms of legibility, portability, durability and annotation – four critical requirements for learners. Why would students, even young hip Facebook’ers, adopt a new technology with so many drawbacks to what went before?

Which brings us back to eReaders. The current generation of eReaders offer eInk screens which mimic the quality of ink on paper, reducing eye-strain and extending battery life. They are also wireless (Kindle) and touch-screen (Sony’s PRS). But to create the book industry’s equivalent of an “iPod” moment, they will also need to be colour, web-enabled, global (Kindle is still US only) and cheaper (the DX is $489). I also believe that they will need to be eWriters – enabling saveable freeform note-taking and scribbling. Once armed with this combination of features, eReaders will truly overturn first the mainstream book publishing industry, followed by textbook publishing (as well as newspapers, journals and magazines for good measure). I suspect that eReaders will also usurp laptops as a digital device we don’t leave home without.

I have predicted elsewhere (http://bit.ly/Fvopm) that such devices will appear in the second half of 2011, with widespread adoption occurring in 2012. So we have less than three years to prepare for the start of this new world. Having said that, the full impact on the world of education will be felt over a good 15 years. Here’s a potential scenario for where we are heading:

Jane is 16 and doing a history homework assignment (“The depression of 2007-2012”) flopped on the sofa. Her teacher mentioned it and then sent the full brief wirelessly at the end of class to all students’ eReaders. Having read the recommended e- text (Brown & Darling’s “caught between a northern rock and a hard place”) and watched the accompanying video, Jane gets past the warm-up exercise second time round (after some personalised feedback on where she went wrong first time). She has just searched for and reviewed some of her own relevant notes (all written during class with her ePen and saved on her eReader’s curriculum tracker) and is now scribbling some ideas down, aided by a mind-mapping app. When she has a theme and logical structure developed, she’ll hit the OCR button to render her notes into essay format. She’ll then move to her desk and finish off the formal write-up, before submitting the completed assignment. Her school’s network records this and will flow all assignments to teachers for assessment and tracking (again, on their eReaders), with her grade history fully searchable via her eReader.

No doubt eReaders will have their initial impact in HE in the US, before spreading to HE in the UK and elsewhere. Once they have proven their value and costs have fallen, funding models will be developed to roll them out in schools, assisted by a new generation of teachers familiar with how to use them effectively.

The business model accompanying the introduction of eReaders is hard to predict. In HE, hardware costs will probably be expected to be stumped up by students, in return for lower textbook prices, and possibly embedded in tuition fees (in the US at least). Amazon is currently riling publishers by taking 70% of ebook revenues and retaining total control of pricing. However, workflow-embedded textbooks are a very different proposition to selling a basic eBook. It is likely that two or three competing VLE applications will emerge (quite possibly spun out of major publishing houses), with publishers developing new “titles” that are compatible with one or all of them – as functionality will be broadly similar. Revenue-sharing deals will be cut between content- and VLE-owners. VLE’s will either be browser-based or applications which can run on eReader operating systems. This should foster an era of innovation in teaching and learning materials, as new features are added to eReaders and VLE’s and authors in turn push the boundaries of how to exploit them. Where this leaves device-makers to make their profits is unclear; Apple makes a lot more from iPod hardware sales than from iTunes, but Amazon is ultimately more interested in ensuring that it takes its cut on every Kindle eBook sale. Other eReader makers are hedging their bets so far, but none (with the exception of Apple itself, which is poised to enter the fray within the next few months) has sufficient market power to avoid open formats. Which is good news for publishers, who need to nurture a competitive landscape which isn’t dominated by Amazon’s and Apple’s closed eco-systems. And a key part of doing this is ensuring that traditional-format textbooks are licensed as eBooks for a range of devices, to avoid Amazon’s 70% cut becoming the benchmark for the sector, and a punishment for inaction…