All educational publishers know the holy trinity of textbook publishing: California, Florida and Texas. And winning or losing one out of three of these states in an adoption can tip the economic balance of any program. If California goes free, the economics for education publishing companies will radically shift. Also, it is then likely that Florida and Texas and many other states will follow California's lead in sourcing free educational content. Most immediately, California's migration toward the provision of free textbooks has been driven by the state's precarious financial situation. An effective moratorium on new textbook purchases...

Related: September 15 Webcast on the future of ISBNs. – D.R. In its current form the ISBN is not yet dead---I’m a big supporter---but therein lies the problem: “in its current form.” What about its future health? To gain entry to the supply chain, most small and medium-sized publishers will continue to buy their ISBNs from agencies around the world as they have since the 1970's. In contrast, most large publishers have reservoirs of ISBNs sufficient to last almost forever and only occasionally buy new prefixes to establish new imprints. Small wonder that ISBNs have been...

No one believes Amazon's text-to-speech retreat has anything to do with Audible? So Amazon's people gear up to fight the legal battle that will let the company do T-T-S on the Kindle. And then they find that they've has cut out one of the key foundations for a business just bought for $300 million? Perhaps the Audible people were as surprised as all of the industry and have only just been able to navigate though the booming laughter to make their points. I’m very skeptical that Amazon is doing this in the interests of the publishing community....

The news that Nintendo will add book content to the DS product platform may have publishing executives humming the refrain from The King and I---"Getting to Know You"---as they jet off to Tokyo. But could this event be ominous for content owners? Will they run the risk that their content won't be valued adequately by the target users? While the content will be paid for, it is very cheap. The content in  the package isn't new (front list) but the aggressive pricing will establish a price expectation in the minds of the consumer. It reminds me of the...

Moderator's note: At the end I'll add my own thoughts on what this could mean for e-books. - D.R. Travel up Route 17 in northern New Jersey and you traverse the spectrum of big box retailing. These stores---from Ikea to K-mart---represent the shop windows on late 20th century retailing; but, in contrast to their apparent ubiquity, the days of the stand-alone big box retailer may be numbered. Many years ago I saw some old photos of Route 17 and was shocked to learn it used to be a four lane (two each side) parkway with a wide...

Michael Cairns, our newest contributor, is former president of Bowker and managing partner of Information Media Partners, a strategy firm. Check out his PersonNonData blog. Welcome, Michael! - D.R. Should readers really miss the book review sections that newspapers are dropping? It was a hot topic last year, with speculation on the future of reading and books generally. Now we see the demise of several more sections, including the one at the LA. Times, which published its final stand-alone edition on July 27. Should we lament this trend? As I see it, the arguments in favor of...