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eLearning
Will the CafeScribe Acquisition Give a Boost to Electronic Textbooks?
An interview with CafeScribe CEO Bryce Johnson
4/16/2008
CT: So a part of what your company is offering to publishers is a formula that you've devised for keeping control of the copyright?
Johnson: That's correct. Basically, we take a fingerprint of each machine and use your username and password, and that's what is used to decrypt and encrypt the file.
CT: Cost savings have to be a reason driving e-textbooks as well, I would think. What's the average amount students spend on textbooks a year, according to your figures, and how do you base your pricing at CafeScribe?
Johnson: The average student spends around $1,000 per year. Typically, the publishers are providing content to us so that we can price [e-books] around 30 [percent] to 50 percent off [for now].
CT: So half-off on textbooks, essentially. And if I'm a subscriber to CafeScribe, what can I do with any available book? Can I print out the entire book?
Johnson: Right now, it's set up so that you have an account, and you can download a book to up to three different computers. You have a 30 percent print, copying and paste limit. I don't think any student has ever reached that amount. Let's say you want to print four or five chapters--in a thousand-page textbook, that's a big chunk. Copy and paste is the same--30 percent of the book.
CT: How many textbooks do you have available now? Do you know what percentage of the total textbooks available you now offer?
Johnson: I don't know that figure. We have agreements in places like MIT and Stanford ... and with some of the big publishers. That's part of [the deal with] Follett--they have relationships with all of them, and they have content in electronic form for many [textbooks]. I believe that we'll see a lot more content coming online over the next year.
CT: Based on what you've seen from your beta testing, are students using the social networking component of CafeScribe?
Johnson: Absolutely. I would say probably around 60 percent are.... What we found in some of our surveys is that many students didn't realize it was available, so we've made changes. That's why we're in beta. We've made changes so that they're more aware that there's this network of other users using the textbooks, and they can subscribe to those notes.
It's a new concept that fundamentally changes the way you interact with a textbook. Formerly, students would sit together in a study group of three to five others. They weren't able to see each other's notes in each other's textbooks.
There are a number of students in some junior colleges that have said, "Hey, can I subscribe to students' notes from Stanford?" I said, "Sure, as long as they're out there and they haven't blacklisted you." You can cut each other off, by the way. Let's say you're in a competing class and I just don't want you to be able to subscribe to my notes. I can go in and say, "So-and-so can't subscribe to my notes."
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