Can Tech Transcend the Textbook?

As the e-book market explodes, publishers and educators debate why e-textbooks lag behind -- and what they should even look like.

• By John K. Waters
• 03/01/11

Illustration by Ryan Etter

After traveling a long, tortuous road, the much-anticipated e-book revolution has finally arrived. Any doubt that the future of the book is digital has been laid to rest. Kindles and iPads sold like hotcakes during the 2010 Christmas shopping season, and Forrester Research expects the recipients of those devices to spend more than $1 billion on e-books in 2011, and $3 billion by the middle of the decade.

So where's the revolution in the e-textbook market? According to the National Association of College Stores (NACS), digital books currently account for less than 3 percent of textbook sales. NACS expects that percentage to reach 10 to 15 percent by 2012, while researchers at Simba Information predict that e-textbooks will account for more than 11 percent of textbook sales by 2013. But even this relatively swift growth rate represents a trickle compared to the flood of e-book sales on Amazon.

"To state the obvious, academic publishing is slower to change," says Vineet Madan, vice president of strategy and business development in McGraw-Hill's Higher Education group. "But so is the market we serve. There's a lot at stake for students. The money they spend on a textbook is an expense related to an outcome -- a grade, which gets you to a credit, which gets you to a degree, which, hopefully, gets you to the job you're looking for. As long as the online experience doesn't offer significant value over the print experience, I believe the preference in consumption will still be toward print."

That preference has shown up starkly in some recent surveys. Three-quarters of the students queried by both NACS and the Student Public Interest Research Groups said they'd rather use a paper-based textbook than its digital cousin. Eighty percent of the students queried in the fall 2010 College Student Tracking Survey, commissioned by the Nebraska Book Co. and conducted by Crux Research working with Harris Interactive, said they bought new textbooks; 72 percent bought used textbooks; 20 percent were renters; and only 8 percent bought digital textbooks.

Matt MacInnis, co-founder and CEO of e-book publishing startup Inkling (not the same company as Inkling Books), sees these responses as an unsurprising reaction to the current state of e-textbook publishing.

"All it means is that everything those students have seen up to this point has been junk," MacInnis says. "Come on. Present me with a PDF on a screen and I'll take a book any day."

An Interactive Experience
MacInnis, along with partners Robert Cromwell and Josh Forman, started their company in 2009 to take advantage of a then-unreleased device that promised to change the digital publishing landscape: the iPad. Before going out on his own, MacInnis worked at Apple for eight years, managing the company's international market development for education. He started Inkling, he says, after years of watching technology's power to change the way people learn go unexploited.