Are e-textbooks the Next Big Market?

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There’s no doubt that ebooks are taking market share from regular books, and the marketplace is getting very crowded with companies attempting to grab a slice of the action. e-Textbooks, on the other hand, have been a much tougher sell. The Kindle famously flamed out in various university trials, and it’s too early to tell if the iPad will be a success for studying.

Still, it hasn’t stopped several companies from rolling out strategies to break into the textbook market. B&N has nookStudy, Macmillan has DynamicBooks, and now Engadget is reporting that Entourage (of the infamous dual-screened ebook reader) has struck a deal to bring books from Cengage Learning into the Entourage Edge eBookstore. The big question is whether any of these contenders will succeed.

nookSTUDY and DynamicBooks both rely on the presence of a full computer. As of now, there’s no concrete plans to bring either one to mobile devices, so their usefulness as portable resources is limited to laptop and netbook use. While both solutions bring a great deal beyond a dead-tree textbook and a photocopied syllabus, they are limited by schools and individual professors taking full advantage of the multimedia and interactive features. In my view, whoever gets to market with an iPhone/iPad version first is likely to have the best chance of capturing marketshare, but it all hinges on making the workflow as easy as pen, paper, textbook and highlighter!

It seems like the Entourage Edge should be a home run for academic environments. The eInk screen allows for long sessions of reading without eyestrain, and the tablet side makes it easy to annotate, etc. Of course, the reality is that the whole kit is very expensive, almost the price of an iPad, and it’s running a 1.x version of Android when the developer market is rushing towards 2.1 and 2.2. Yes, the new Cengage deal is going to help them immensely, but pricing and hardware issues are big hurdles to overcome.

And all these digital textbook ideas have to beat the existing low-price leader in the textbook world-used books. When you can head to your local college bookstore and buy and sell your old textbooks at a fraction of the cost of a new one, a non-resalable copy needs to really be worth the money. It seems like education is the perfect market for ebooks, but with pricing and hardware limitations, this may end up taking longer to develop than the commercial ebook market. Quite a few companies are rushing in just in case…but who’s going to be using them this fall?

It’s been a while since I was in school, so if you are a current student, please share your thoughts on e-textbooks below, or email them to carly (at) geardiary (dot) com. Specifically, I’m curious if a) you’ve used or your school plans to use electronic materials instead of printed books, b) you’ve used or plan to use an iPad/Kindle/other tablet device for school, and c) if being able to resell a textbook makes a difference to you when you purchase it. If enough people can share their experiences, I will post them next week. It doesn’t matter how many e-textbooks are available if no one is using them, and that’s what I am curious to learn!

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About the Author

Zek
Zek has been a gadget fiend for a long time, going back to their first PDA (a Palm M100). They quickly went from researching what PDA to buy to following tech news closely and keeping up with the latest and greatest stuff. They love writing about ebooks because they combine their two favorite activities; reading anything and everything, and talking about fun new tech toys. What could be better?

4 Comments on "Are e-textbooks the Next Big Market?"

  1. I would have loved to have my text books as a digital format. With today’s technology though, mobile access should be a given. It would be nice to study when I have a few minutes to kill.

    One downside: parents buy the books. Students sell them and keep the change. That won’t happen with ebooks. The other issue is long-term viability. With a text book, I can keep it forever and reference it. If the ebook format stops being supported with software, then I’m out of luck. Floppy disks anyone?

  2. I run a tablet PC program at a large medical school. We bought the students the full suite of texts required for school for two years. The feedback from students was that the texts were nice as reference, but they hated trying to read for any length of time. When asked if they would pay for them, the response was a resounding “No”, as they couldn’t do things like read them in the tub, they had to worry about battery life, and they don’t like to read texts in the first place. We’ve switched since to web based resources which the students are much happier with.

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  4. Are e-textbooks the Next Big Market? http://bit.ly/dtrDOQ

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