The Radical Transformation of the Textbook

guest · Aug 4, 2019

The Radical Transformation of the Textbook
The way textbooks are bought and sold is changing—with serious implications for higher education
August 4, 2019
https://www.wired.com/story/digital-textbooks-radical-transformation/

For several decades, textbook publishers followed the same basic model: Pitch a hefty tome of knowledge to faculty for inclusion in lesson plans; charge students an equally hefty sum; revise and update its content as needed every few years. Repeat.

In a way, the evolution of the textbook has mirrored that in every other industry. Ownership has given way to rentals, and analog to digital.
Let’s Get Digital
Pearson is one of the biggest publishers of educational books in the world, with a roster of 1,500 textbooks in the US market. Last month, it announced that going forward it would adopt a “digital first” strategy. It’ll still produce physical textbooks, but students will rent by default with the option to buy after the rental period ends.

“I believe there’s a time and a place for digital, but educators need to be mindful of the time and place for using these resources. Rolling out these digital suites is not really the best for student learning.”
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guest · Aug 4, 2019

“The $300 textbook is dead,” says the CEO of textbook maker Pearson
John Fallon explains why the education company is pivoting to digital textbooks
August 2, 2019
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/2...a-teachers-kara-swisher-recode-decode-podcast

“There’s a famous phrase: The first step in solving a problem is recognizing you’ve got one,” says Pearson CEO John Fallon. And for education company Pearson, the problem is also one of its key products: the textbook.

Since the 1970s, the business model for textbook makers has been to sell very expensive books to students, updating them every few years with new material to keep students paying top dollar. But online textbook rental services from companies like Chegg and Amazon have made it much easier to pay much less, and as a result Pearson’s revenues have fallen from $2 billion in 2013 to $1.3 billion today, Fallon said on the latest episode of Recode Decode With Kara Swisher.
Below, we’ve shared a lightly edited full transcript of Kara’s conversation with John.
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guest · Jan 21, 2020

Georgia State U. says digital textbooks will save students $300K
January 17, 2020
https://edscoop.com/georgia-state-university-oer-digital-textbooks/

Open educational resources will save more than 1,000 criminal justice and criminology students a total of nearly $300,000 annually, Georgia State University announced this week.

The grant fits into the Andrew Young School’s “Digital Landscape” initiative and is designed to embrace new technology and encourage open access for students. AYS Open, one of the Digital Landscape pillars, focuses on open educational resources.

“Expensive textbooks harm learning,” Jacques said in a press release. “This transformation to no-cost materials will make our students more successful.”
The university system says those programs have reached more than 48,000 students and have saved more than $7.5 million.

The initiative also houses all OER created through the grant programs and the open textbook development project in a single free repository online.
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The embrace of OER in Georgia comes nearly six months after the textbook publisher and education services company Pearson announced it would go “digital-first” with its current roster of textbooks for higher education.
OpenStax, an OER publisher housed at Rice University, reported more than $177 million in savings for students using OER over traditional textbooks in 2018.
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USG Textbook Transformation Grant Saves Students Money, Supports Goals of AYS Open

ATLANTA—The Andrew Young School of Policy Studies’ Department of Criminal Justice & Criminology recently received a $30,000 Textbook Transformation Grant from Affordable Learning Georgia (ALG), a University System of Georgia program. It will be used to reduce textbook costs for the department’s required courses by offering a no-cost section.

The AGL grant, which supports the college’s AYS Open initiative, is projected to save more than 1,000 students of criminal justice and criminology approximately $290,000 total per academic year.

“We’re very excited about these results,” said Dean Sally Wallace. “They show how the digital world can advance student success.”
Georgia State leads all USG institutions in the amount of savings these grants have provided students.
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guest · Jan 27, 2020

For open educational resources, Virginia launches statewide platform
January 27, 2020
https://edscoop.com/open-educational-resources-virginia-goopenva-launches/

Officials in Virginia on Friday announced the launch of a new website that allows educators at all grade levels to share open educational resources.

The platform, which the state calls #GoOpenVA, already includes 10,000 text-based, video and audio files, including content hosted by national OER websites along with content submitted directly by Virginia teachers. The platform is part of a budding statewide movement Virginia officials are promoting to encourage the use and propagation of free-to-use and unlicensed educational content, also known as open educational resources, or OER.

Use of an OER collection published by the Houston, Texas-based Rice University in 2018 saved students $177 million over traditional textbooks and learning materials, according to the university. Earlier this month, Georgia State University said its approximately 1,000 criminal justice and criminology students will save nearly $300,000 annually through the use of OER.
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Major publishers are also attempting to keep up with the digital trend, lowering their prices and sometimes putting digital content first.
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guest · Feb 12, 2020

Students saved nearly $5M with Penn State's open educational resources
February 11, 2020
https://edscoop.com/students-save-5-million-penn-states-open-educational-resources-oer/

Penn State announced last week that its initiative to enable access to higher education by lowering the cost of textbooks and other course materials has made serious progress, saving students a combined $4.8 million over the past three years.

“Penn State’s novel, combined approach to lowering textbook costs through the use of both freely open and affordable, or low-cost, resources, is gaining notice in higher education nationwide,” Penn State’s Rebecca Miller Waltz said in a press release.
One of the primary benefits of increasing availability of open and affordable course materials, though, said Waltz, has been students’ reduced cost of attending classes.

Student spending on course materials declined by 14 percent between 2018 and 2019 [...] This is largely due to OER, according to the report, which cites that 89 percent of students have used some form of free content.
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With the success of Penn State’s initiative, the initial three-year investment to reduce the cost of textbooks and course materials has been renewed with an additional $600,000 to continue improving the affordability of education.
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Penn State: Open, affordable textbook efforts save students $4.8 million in potential costs

guest · Jul 28, 2021

SUNY Poly ditches physical bookstores with virtual offering
July 27, 2021
https://edscoop.com/suny-poly-ditches-physical-bookstore-akademos/

SUNY Polytechnic Institute on Tuesday announced it’s dropping its on-campus bookstores in favor of an entirely online storefront for textbooks.

The change, which coincides with the completion of the university’s contract with its former bookstore vendor, is intended to lower the cost of education for students and more closely align with media trends, university leaders told EdScoop. A deal with the online platform Akademos will give the Upstate New York institution an opportunity to repurpose the old space, said John Reale, SUNY Poly’s executive director of auxiliary services.

“We all know that the traditional model of the campus bookstore is changing,” Reale said. “It has been and we have more competition with Amazon and other online providers and the students end up going to save costs.”
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Textbook costs have dropped as open educational materials have become more accessible and more publishers have shifted their business models away from physical book sales. Large and small publishers have told EdScoop they prefer the lower price point of digital sales, not to mention the flexibility and added features of the format.

Students prefer cheaper books, too, but the price of textbooks is still high enough that in 2020, 65% of students surveyed by the U.S. PIRG Education Fund said they skipped buying a book because of cost.
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guest · Aug 1, 2021

There’s Another ‘+’ on the Market: Pearson+, the Wannabe Netflix for College Textbooks
July 31, 2021
https://gizmodo.com/there-s-another-on-the-market-pearson-the-wannab-1847402746

As if there weren’t enough services with a “+” in their name, here’s another for your list: Pearson+, the wannabe Netflix for college textbooks.

Pearson recently unveiled Pearson+, a desktop and mobile app that will offer digital textbooks from the company’s catalogue via a two-tiered subscription model. The $9.99 per month single tier gives students access to one Pearson textbook, while the $14.99 multi-tier provides access to more than 1,500 textbooks. In a news release, the company said Pearson+ would offer students the “most flexible and budget friendly” way to access digital textbooks and study tools. The app will be released on U.S. campuses in the fall.
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When you compare that offer to the prices for print textbooks on Pearson’s website at the moment—which include a laboratory manual at $63.99 and an engineering textbook at $181.32, among a range of other prices—that does sound like a bargain.

That may be very nice, but as the Financial Times points out, many students are assigned textbooks from a variety of publishers.
It could also create another problem: pressuring professors to choose textbooks that might not be the best ones for the class.
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guest · Oct 18, 2021

Pearson+ claims 2 million registered users since launch in July
October 18, 2021
https://edscoop.com/pearson-claims-2-million-registered-users-since-launch-in-july/

Textbook company Pearson reported its textbook subscription service, Pearson+, has drawn 2 million registered users since its July launch, according to an investor presentation last Friday.

About 100,000 people pay for the service, which charges a $14.99 a month for unlimited digital textbooks or $9.99 for access to one textbook, CEO Andy Bird said in the presentation. The rest of the registered users access Pearson+ as part of other Pearson products.
The direct-to-consumer strategy is contributing only a small amount to revenue “at this stage,” Bird said, but Pearson is optimistic that Pearson+ will continue to attract users through new features and publicity.
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Pearson launched the Pearson+ app in a competitive market that includes textbook rental company Chegg and subscription service Cengage.

The company is also looking to grow its online platform management partnerships in which Pearson runs a school’s virtual learning services.
Bird said Pearson is not likely to compete directly with online course providers like 2U and Coursera, but will focus on “quality over quantity” with in its relationships with institutions to build out more comprehensive services, Bird said.
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guest · Aug 3, 2022

Textbook publisher: NFTs will let us squeeze even more money out of students
But is there any reason to do it?
August 3, 2022

Textbook publisher Pearson suggests blockchain tech could let it take a cut of secondary textbook sales, capturing a section of the book market that’s so far escaped it. As quoted by Bloomberg, Pearson CEO Andy Bird believes non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, could help publishers make money off textbook resales, although he stopped short of describing concrete plans.

“In the analog world, a Pearson textbook was resold up to seven times, and we would only participate in the first sale,” said Bird after the company announced its latest quarterly earnings this week.
“The move to digital helps diminish the secondary market, and technology like blockchain and NFTs allows us to participate in every sale of that particular item as it goes through its life.” Bloomberg suggests this would mean letting buyers resell ebooks, something that’s so far been a rarity in the publishing world.
It’s not clear how, when, or if NFTs might show up in Pearson’s catalog. But they could mark a new stage in a long-standing publishing war.
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Thanks to legal concepts like the first-sale doctrine, physical book buyers typically own the media they’ve purchased outright, and they’re allowed to sell it without the original publishers making money. But ebooks have complicated that calculus.

That’s historically given physical books a built-in advantage for students, who can buy or sell them secondhand to defray their often extraordinary upfront costs — without the publishers taking any of that money. Allowing ebook resales could make that advantage less dramatic.
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Nothing prevents Pearson or any other major publisher from letting people sell ebook licenses using non-crypto DRM.

A cut of a resold textbook is probably still less lucrative for Pearson than the subscription model it currently favors. But NFTs do seem to have a psychological effect — they make people feel like they own something, even if the ownership is fairly abstract. Textbook makers might see this as an opportunity to push digital markets in a new direction.
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