From The Textbook Guru comes this interesting op-ed on the price of textbooks. We've all heard about how Amazon, the secondhand market, textbook rentals and so on are taking a bite of Big Pub, but what this article points out is that the average price per title is falling across all markets, not just the 'new textbooks from Big Pub' one. And not only that, but sales are holding steady, not increasing, as prices fall. So, why hasn't the Brave New Marketplace opened up the market? The article suggests that the real fulcrum in the market is rental services. Their prices...

We previously reported that Inkling was launching a free e-book publishing platform in competition to Apple’s more restricted iBook Author, and that it was partnering with Follett in an e-textbook program. Up to this point, the utility of Inkling has been a bit limited in that access to its textbooks was restricted to its iOS app, meaning students had to have iPads to make use of the content and couldn’t use it in anything else. But now TechCrunch reports that Inkling has just unveiled an HTML 5.0 web application that can allow any Inkling e-textbook to be viewed on...

Caroline Vanderlip, CEO of SharedBook, has an opinion piece on Inside Higher Ed stating that “going digital” is not a panacea that will automatically bring about lower prices for textbooks. Much as publishers of mass market fiction have been saying, if the costs of producing the material remain the same, the price of the textbook will stay about the same whether the distribution method is digital or electronic. And OER (open educational resources” material will not necessarily change this either, at least for a while—there just isn’t very much of it yet. Vanderlip writes that the best way of...

Might one of the as-yet-untapped benefits of e-books be the ability to revise? After the ending of Mass Effect 3 sent fans into an uproar, BioWare and Electronic Arts have announced that a free downloadable content pack will be released this summer including additional cinematic sequences that will “give fans seeking further clarity to the ending of Mass Effect 3 deeper insights into how their personal journey concludes.” Make no mistake, fans were extremely upset at the ending of the game. Instead of the expected multitude of different endings depending on the choices characters had made, there were...

All may not be coming up roses in e-textbook land. Sarah Kessler reports on Mashable that one of Kno’s largest-selling textbook publishers, Cengage Learning, is attempting to pull its material from Kno’s store—and Kno is suing for breach of license agreement. Though Kno deals with about 40 publishers, Cengage’s content has historically made up 25% of its overall sales. However, Cengage doesn’t like the way Kno allows users to copy and paste passages from textbooks into a separate journal view, considering it an unauthorized derivative work. The publisher gave Kno 30 days to correct the issue, then terminated the...

On TechCrunch, MG Siegler looks at the new education programs launched by Apple and what they really mean for high schoolers. In Siegler’s opinion, not much. While they might give college students incentive to get iPads, he finds it doubtful that most high school students will be able to get their own, in keeping with Apple’s stated goal that students should be able to buy e-textbooks and keep them forever. The program will be great for college students, Siegler points out. The idea of textbook prices capped at $15 makes the sting of not being able to “sell them...

Ars Technica has a roundup of expectations for tomorrow’s special Apple event. Sources are suggesting a number of interesting possibilities, such as Apple producing a “GarageBand for e-books”—an inexpensive app that simplifies e-book creation and publication as GarageBand has for music. But Apple may have more up its sleeve than just an e-book creation application. It may be planning announcements having to do with digital textbooks, especially considering that the iPad has a great big screen and multimedia capabilities that the company hasn’t really tapped yet for textbook applications. [Inkling CEO Matt] MacInnis...

E-textbook provider Kno has not let getting out of the tablet business slow it down. (Indeed, given the lackluster performance of any tablet not made by Apple or Amazon lately, it was probably the wisest move it could have made.) CNet has a report from CES on some new features Kno has been adding to its e-textbooks. The features include metrics built into the textbooks that will track things like the time students spend reading, notes they’ve taken, and study habits. It will let them compare their own study habits to those of others, and let professors see how...

I’m sure everyone who went to college has had the experience of having to buy a whole book when their professor only turned out to need a few chapters from it. One of the obvious benefits of digital media is that it is more easily segmented than a printed and bound book; in theory, students ought to be able to buy just the parts they need. That’s the idea behind e-textbook site Bookstep.com. This startup allows students to buy just the portions of books and materials their professors need for their classes. Founder Mike Basaraba tells Publishing Perspectives: ...

Steve Jobs has been dead for a few weeks, and so it’s time for everyone to start prognosticating what Jobs really wanted, what he really thought about things, and what he had in mind for the future. Easy to do that when the man isn’t around to speak for himself. Much of this comes from Jobs’s authorized biography, which has been released to newsmedia in advance of its actual publication. Most of it isn’t really on topic for discussion here, but the New York Times mentions that Jobs was planning to hire textbook writers to create digital versions of...

Wired’s Gadget Lab blog reports on the state of digital textbooks, and despite the optimism of some e-textbook manufacturers it isn’t really good. E-textbooks aren’t making much of a dent in the textbook market because most of the time buying and reselling used textbooks is still a better deal. Even though the current generation of students are more dependent on digital technology and mobile devices than ever, most aren’t buying e-textbooks because they are pricier and more heavily restricted than paper books—locked down so students have only limited use of them, and sometimes even expiring after six months....

Here’s some more intriguing e-textbook news from Kno, who recently released a survey showing that the majority of college students would give up sex to avoid carrying heavy textbooks, and who also released an HTML5-based app that allows students to read textbooks through Facebook and the web, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has an interesting piece looking at some new interactive features in Kno’s e-textbook iPad app. One such feature is a form of 3D modeling that can convert chemical notations showing how atoms bond together into 3D models that can be enlarged and rotated so students can get...