There was an interesting article in yesterday’s LA Time’s that gives a timely perspective on the proliferation of e-textbooks in the student market. The crux of the argument is that e-textbooks, although half the price of print textbooks, may actually not be cheaper in the long run. Students can usually return their print textbooks for 50% of what they initially paid and 3/4 of students, recently surveyed, said they would not read e-textbooks on their computer and would instead print them out. Therefore in the long run, the price of e-textbooks may actually be more expensive.

I am going to disagree with the general thesis here and say that e-textbooks are in fact cheaper, however the publishing industry needs to be innovative about how they package and distribute these products. Firstly, I am going to disagree with the fact that students can return their books for 50% of the face value. I am not too far removed from my university years to remember going back to the campus bookstore with a bundle of textbooks cradled in my arms hoping to come home with a nice sum of cash. Year after year I would be dissapointed by the measly amount of money I was refunded and in some cases the amount was so negligable that I chose to keep the textbook. Therefore to base an argument on the fact that students are receiving 50% of the money they spend on physical textbooks back seems flawed.

On another note educational publishers, like Taylor and Francis, are becoming very innovative in the ways that they are packaging their textbooks for students. Students can now pick and choose which chapters of the textbook they want to buy instead of forking out $1000 for the entire book. Many professors will only assign a handful of chapters as requird reading for a given semester and by only buying the chapters they need, students can greatly reduce the money they spend on textbooks.

Finally I need to address the fact that 3/4 of unviersity students said they do not feel comfortable reading textbooks on their computer and instead would opt to print them out. There are two points that need to be made here. Firstly, as e-readers become widely available (Amazon may actually be creating a Kindle specifically designed for students … think easy highlighting and in-line note taking) students will find that they only need to pay for the upfront cost of the reader and that reading using tools like the Kindle are actually even more comfortable than reading on printed paper. This will greatly reduce the cost of going to the copy shop and printing out an entire book. However, publishers must not disregard the fact that 75% of students said that they would not feel comfortable reading on a computer screen. Most students in the early days will not buy Kindles and the publishers and e-book distributors need to find ways of making students more comfortable reading on their screens if they want to make e-books economically attractive. This has been a major topic of focus for us here at Spreed. We are dedicated to the field of eye science to understand how the end-user receives information from a monitor. We have developed a very unique way of displaying text on a screen so that students may find it far easier to read their textbooks on their computer instead of printing them out. Publishers must search to find ways of presenting their textbooks on computer screens in a way that students will not feel the need to run to the copy shop.

The bottom line is that the article really only gives one side of the story and does not look too far into the future. The trends are pretty clear and as publishers and students become more comfortable with this changing industry, we will find that e-textbooks are far cheaper and superior in quality to the printed textbooks of the paste. However, please take a look at the LA Time’s article that can be found below and come back here to leave your thoughts on this topic.

E-textbooks may not be cheaper than printer ones, report says: LA Times

A sharply critical report released Monday asserts that commercial publishers are going about the digital textbook revolution the wrong way. Commercial e-textbooks are no cheaper than hard-copy editions when you take into account that students can sell print books back to the bookstore for half the cover price, according to the report from a national coalition of student public interest research groups. And restrictions on printing and online access make commercial e-books unfeasible for many students, the report said.

I just found a fantastic new blog written by an expert in the field of eye science, Kevin Larson. Anyone who is interested in how the brain and eye interact with electronic text should check it out here:

The Font Blog

Here is Dr. Larson’s bio, just reading this and his corresponding blog makes me wish I had the chance to buy him a coffee and pick his brain for an hour (or two, or three …):

I am a psychologist who has been working for Microsoft in different capacities since 1996. In 2000 I completed my PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Texas at Austin studying word recognition and reading acquisition. I joined the ClearType team in 2002 to help get a better scientific understanding of the benefits of ClearType and other reading technologies with the goal of achieving a great on-screen reading experience.

During my first year with the team I gave a series of talks on relevant psychological topics, some of which instigated strong disagreement. At the crux of the disagreement was that the team believed that we recognized words by looking at the outline that goes around a whole word, while I believed that we recognize individual letters. In my young career as a reading psychologist I had never encountered a model of reading that used word shape as perceptual units, and knew of no psychologists who were working on such a model. But it turns out that the model had a very long history that I was unfamiliar with.

It has been about a month since the launch of Spreed:News and we have had some fantastic feedback from our community. Today we released a new version of Spreed:News to the public. The new version has a number of feature updates including:

• The ability to post articles to twitter
• The ability to rate an article
• 10 articles per news sources, instead of just 5
• A major update to our feed library (i.e. more news sources)
• And an updated algorithm

This new algorithm is the most exciting development for us. As we continue to grow, the changes to the algorithm will keep expanding to help increase reading efficiency and comprehension. The most recent update to the algorithm introduces: 

•  New grammar rules
•  A method for evaluating each sentence with multiple cluster breakdowns. The best cluster is then chosen based on the most uniform cluster length
• Better recoginition of proper nouns.

We will be constantly updating the application over the next few weeks and will provide a post here on our blog to let everyone know of the developments. We will also be releasing an application for the iTunes App store very shortly and will be rolling back the curtains on another product from Spred Inc. that will be launching in September.

Please feel free to contact us at feedback@spreedinc.com if you have any suggestions, comments or feedback. We are also actively looking for people to demo our new products, so feel free to contact us if you woud like a sneak peak at some of the products in our lab.

There has been a lot of speculation recently regarding the future of e-books and whether they are going to be the next big thing. What we do know at this point is that Amazon has sold 240, 000 Kindles. Given these numbers, Techcrunch’s  Erick Schonfield suggested that Citi analyst Mark Mahaney update his most recent projections for the future of the Kindle (and to some extent e-books in general). Mahaney’s new numbers suggest that Kindle sales estimates should be around 378,000 for this year, 934,000 next year, and 4.4 million in 2010. These are not numbers to scoff at. If Mahaney’s projections are correct the Kindle will be a $1 billion for Amazon by 2010.

The big question for me is that even though these numbers are high, can e-books really win over the mass-audience. Two recent articles, one from Naomi Alderman and another from Peter Conrad of the UK’s Guardian give light to the different sides of this debate. Naomi on one hand advocates the move toward e-books. She is fed up with the piles of books overwhelming her apartment and finds the Kindle easy to use and convenient. Peter on the other hand stuggles to accept that e-books are the future. He argues that reading ebooks actually left him feeling alienated from books he used to love growing up. These two perspectives highlight the seperate camps very well and it is hard to say whether either one represents the mass public at this point.

I personally do not think that we are going to see a sudden move to e-books in the next couple of years. The cost of an e-book reader is still a large up front investment when compared to the one off price of a paperback. What I will say is that in certain segments, where people have to buy large amounts of books that they must use on a regular basis, the student market for example, we will see a fairly substantial adoption of e-book technology. Students can offset the cost of the reader by only purchasing individual chapters of textbooks as they need them, thus reducng their overall spending on textbooks for years to come. This makes perfect sense and I see the student (as they often do) leading the proliferation . The only hurdle I see holding students back is the inability to easily highlight text. Yes, you are able to click and drag, but nothing will ever replace the relaxing sensation of passing a hightlighter over a line of text.  

This is going to be a very interesting industry to watch over the next 5-10 years and if the new projections are correct, Amazon is very well positioned to ride the wave (as they usually are). See Mark Mahaney’s numbers below: