In 2015 the companies below dominated the 8.8 Billion Dollar a year digital textbook market:
2015 Digital Textbook Market
44 % of 8.8 Billion = 3.8 Billion dollar industry by next year.
The economics of the publishing industry do not have much room for price decline, even if they do enter the digital market. Author royalties, editorial costs, sales costs and overhead will keep the prices of textbooks high, even if there are no printing costs!
Keep this in mind when your thinking about Activity 3. What opportunities exist here?
Free Digital Texbook Platform Idea
Years ago companies such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Sony introduced electronic book readers. Concurrently, they each created a standard for publishing e-books and opened it up to independent publishers. Apple has done the same thing with ibooks. Each of these business models are focused around the platform host (Apple, Amazon) taking a large chunk of the sale price (some as high as 50%) to list and sell the books from the independent publishers. For some, this works, but as a market none of these platforms have really taken off in both sales or independent book volumes.
What if somebody takes the YouTube approach of a free platform to host digital textbooks. A entire textbook might be to daunting of a task to create but maybe you can create one chapter and then your able to compose a entire textbook from pieces of everybody else's work. This idea would flip the textbook market upside down and also allow for a more personal feel to your classroom. How often have you even been in a class that has read the entire textbook? How often have you taught a course that your made your students read the entire textbook? However, in both cases somebody paid for that entire textbook. I know your big question.
Where does the money come from and go?
As with facebook and all other social media platforms these days, the way to make money with a free site is through advertising. By taking on ads, you can generate an audience who will come to you for the information, and be exposed to the advertising you provide. Because these textbooks are free, they will be required to have ad space in them. More importantly advertisers will be able to focus in on specific demographics easily because of the content of the books and/or the demographics who will be reading the books. The more content that is used from an individual the more advertising money that is shared with them. This will bring in not only independent publishers but as with YouTube, you will have companies formed to provide content on the site. . YouTube was purchased in 2006 for 1.6 Billion dollars. Today analysts value it around 40 Billion. This is suppose to be the information age. Most information is free except when we put it together in a book and then we get to charge $100 for it. Doesn't seem right!
ARE YOU THINKING NOW?
References
THE DIGITAL Text BOOK REPORT 2015 JUNE JAMRICH PARSONS Presented at the Text and Academic Authors Association (TAA) Conference Las Vegas, NV June 2015 Eaton, K. (2011, March 16). [digital image]. Untitled. Retrieved from http://www.fastcompany.com/1739420/goodbye-wheelie-backpacks-digital-textbooks-will-dominate-over-paper-ones-soon