From the press release:
Despite their fondness for social networking and cell phones, most college students say they prefer textbooks in printed rather than e-text form. Nearly 75% of students to recently respond to a major new research survey from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) said they prefer printed texts, citing a fondness for print’s look and feel, as well as its permanence and ability to be resold.
This finding was among many uncovered in BISG’s inaugural survey entitled Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education. The ongoing survey focuses on college student perceptions related to educational content and presentation media in the higher education market. It is powered by Bowker’s PubTrack data, the publishing industry’s exclusive resource for understanding buying behavior.
“Research studies like Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education enable informed decision-making,” said Scott Lubeck, BISG’s Executive Director. “College students are an exceptionally dynamic demographic, making the technology transformation underway within the higher ed market very hard to plot. Our ongoing survey of student attitudes will help everyone in the publishing business make sense of this changing market place by providing hard data on the impact of habits and preferences.”
Although not the preferred textbook form for most college students, further data from the survey shows that e-texts do have fans. About 12% of the students surveyed — mostly males, and often MBA-seeking or distance learners — said they prefer e-texts to printed texts because of their lower cost, convenience and portability. In addition, online supplemental materials received favor from these respondents as well. Particularly online quizzes that tests students’ understanding of a text’s content and prepares them for exams.
The majority of survey respondents (60%) said they place high value on core textbooks — whether printed or electronic — most of which continue to be purchased at the college bookstore (65%). Online purchasing is growing, however. For example, one-fifth of students said they purchased textbooks from Amazon.com. Finally, perhaps because of rising purchase prices, renting a textbook — rather than purchasing or downloading — was preferred by 11% of surveyed students.
In responding to a question like that, it is very important to understand the respondent’s concept of the alternatives. That students have a pretty good grasp of the pBook concept is probably a safe assumption. However, the same cannot be said for respondents’ grasp of the eBook concept. Is it a thing that costs almost as much as a pBook, cannot be resold and expires at the end of the semester? If so, we shouldn’t wonder at the preference for pBooks in a survey such as this.
Textbooks have crazy prices partly because they’re all resold, meaning publishers have to cover all costs with the first semester in use. If they charge half as much for an electronic textbook that can’t be sold, the student gets a cheaper book he/she can keep and the publisher makes a ton more money. If the publisher tries to charge paper-style prices for his eBook, students will stick with resellable paper books.
Rob Preece
Publisher
I believe both of the above comments are on the money. Surveys are critically dependent on how questions are asked and how answers are interpreted.
The present quality of eBook textbooks is clearly very mixed with all of the issues surrounding graphics and photos. They are also not widespread in use. Hence a great many students will not actually have personal experience of using them – hence they are very unlikely to rate them above paper text books.
College students, though young, are still subject to the same kinds of prejudice that the rest of society has and the improvements in eBook textbooks in the next two or three years, allied to a wider hands on experience across the population will undoubtedly change this view as a new generation moves though the system.
As far as paper textbooks that cost an arm and a leg are concerned, these are difficult to asses because they are printed in small runs and depend a lot on being chosen by individual teachers/lecturers. Their pricing is therefore not based on market competition and in many cases there are behind the scenes relationships that drive pricing far more than any other real-market factor.
if they were not priced so high it is also likely that students would not be so desperate to sell them on and hence reduce the sales.