The future of textbooks, or: What will get 25 percent of the students to give up sex for one month?

Here's a very interesting infographic on the textbooks of tomorrow, where you'll find everything you want to know about the future of this industry, which we hope will be offering students eventually with cheaper and greener solutions.

To see the graphic in full size, please double click on it.


Via: OnlineEducation.net

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant a tree for every book you read!

Free webcast - Digital Textbooks: Innovations from the Academic Business Model

I wanted to share with you an update I received on an interesting free webcast entitled Digital Textbooks: Innovations From the Academic Business Model that will take place next Tuesday. It is presented by Digital Book World and Publishers Weekly and sponsored by Aptara. You can register here.

Here are the details:

In the trade, the digital transition has upended the marketplace, changing the entire publishing process. In academic publishing, the challenges of digital are no less seismic. Factors like piracy, a growing secondary market, and an environment that demands greater customization and speed to market present real tests to academic publishers. There are also great opportunities: ebooks, enhanced and otherwise, offer academic publishers a chance to make textbooks more relevant to students and potentially increase adoption rates. In this free WEBcast, Digital Textbooks: Innovations From the Academic Business Model, academic and trade publishers can learn from the lessons of big and small innovators at the forefront of digital.

We'll talk to start-ups and large publishers to find out how digital innovation has reshaped the academic marketplace.

Join us on Tuesday, August 9th at 1PM ET / 10 AM PT for this free WEBcast presented in partnership with Publishers Weekly and sponsored by Aptara.

AGENDA

• New business models for selling content to educators and students by the chapter and by the format.
• What "open textbooks," or free online versions of course material, have done to curb attrition rates of textbook purchases by semester.
• How academic enhanced ebooks have added video, audio, and interactive features that go beyond bells-and-whistles publishing and improve the learning experience.

This WEBcast will primarily appeal to publishers in both academic and trade who are interested in new ways of selling and delivering content.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Matt MacInnis
Raised in rural Nova Scotia, Matt attended Harvard University where he earned a degree in Computer Engineering and Chinese Language. He moved to California and pursued an eight-year career at Apple where he managed the company's international expansion into international education markets. During that time, Matt saw a lot of misuse of technology in the classroom, and in 2009 his frustration drove him to start Inkling. With a vision for reinventing the textbook, Matt has led Inkling into partnerships with the world's largest publishers, building engaging, interactive learning content from the ground up for iPad. Both Matt and Inkling are based in San Francisco, CA.

Eric Frank
Eric brings an 11 year track record of success in higher education publishing to Flat World Knowledge, an eTextbook customization firm. He has held positions in sales, editorial, and marketing at Thomson and Prentice Hall, a division of Pearson Education. Recently, Eric was Director of Marketing for Prentice Hall Business Publishing, a division with annual sales in the hundreds of millions. There, he managed a team of marketing managers and marketing communications staff, and had overall responsibility for strategy, budget, staffing and execution. Eric's group had dotted line responsibility for training and supporting over 160 sales representatives.

Sponsor
Apatra provides digital publishing solutions that deliver significant gains in quality, time-to-market and production costs for eBook publishers. Having converted tens of millions of pages to eBook formats for the world's leading publishers, Aptara offers end-to-end solutions across all content source types and delivery media, including the Amazon Kindle, Apple iPhone, Sony Reader, and Blackberry devices. With partnerships that span the entire production and distribution supply-chain, including relationships with mobile channel partners, Aptara helps publishers stay ahead in this rapidly changing market space.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant one tree for every book your read!

Amazon presents a new e-textbook rental service - Does it make the Kindle any greener?

Three months after Amazon announced it would allow Kindle users to read e-books from more than 11,000 public libraries on the devices, it is going even further and launching Kindle Textbook Rental.

According to Amazon's press release, tens of thousands of textbooks are available for the 2011 school year from leading textbook publishers such as John Wiley & Sons, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis.

Interesting feature of the new program is its flexibility - Kindle Textbook Rental offers the ability to customize rental periods to any length between 30 and 360 days. Students can also easily extend any rental period in increments as small as one day or choose to purchase the book they are renting at any time. The electronic textbooks can be downloaded to and read not just on Amazon's Kindle, but also on other devices such as PC, Mac and iPad using Kindle reading software.

The company claims that students can save up to 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. This element will be very effective in getting more students to use the program. For example, Ryan Judy of Ohio University told msnbc.com that he "would, and probably will, use Kindle's service because I have an iPad and you can just download the Kindle textbooks on there, which makes it really convenient. It's also cheaper. I normally try find the cheapest way to get my books."

It is very interesting development in Amazon's services, but only a natural one as we see a growing interest in digital books among students. My question is whether this new service also helps in making the Kindle greener?

It's obvious that renting textbooks is more eco-friendly than buying new ones because this way you maximize the usage of already printed book. Just like with books, after reading a number textbooks on an e-reader, this practice is becoming greener than the alternative - buying paper textbooks. As the length of textbooks is usually higher tend to be longer (500-600 pages in many cases, if not longer), their footprint is larger than the one of 'regular' books and hence the breakeven point of e-textbooks is smaller than the one of e-books.

So we can definitely see that it would be relatively easy to establish e-textbooks rentals as a greener option with a smaller footprint, but does it make Amazon or the Kindle any greener? It's a difficult question because there is no difference in terms of e-reading if you buy an electronic textbook or rent it. Either way, you're using one electronically instead of its paper version. Nevertheless, the fact that renting might be cheaper for students makes etextbook rental more attractive and increases the chances students will move to textbook e-reading.

This service won't change the carbon footprint of the Kindle - it doesn't change anything in the device's production, transportation, usage or recycling. Also, there's actually a good chance many students will use a Kindle reading app to read it on their iPad or even just read it on their PC.

As you can see it's complicated to estimate the impact of the new service, but there are two things we can say for certain: 1. Amazon's new service might lower eventually the breakeven points of e-readers and tablets as the usage of textbooks electronically will be increased due to the new rental service. 2. Amazon's new service will help eventually in making textbook reading more sustainable. Hopefully it will also help students to get better grades!

To read more on how green is your (and my) Kindle, visit our website at http://www.ecolibris.net/kindle.asp

More resources on the ebooks vs. paper books environmental debate can be found on our website at http://www.ecolibris.net/ebooks.asp.

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: Plant one tree for every book you read!

The digital revolution of textbooks: now in schools

We wrote here couple of times on the digital revolution of textbooks in universities. Now it looks like this trend is not stopping at universities and colleges. Its next stop: high schools.

Tamar Lewin reported today on the New York Times ("In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History") about this interesting trend. And we're not talking only about digitalizing textbooks and providing them in an electronic format. This is not the big story here. The story is about the new free open-content digital books that can be customized in accordance with every teacher's needs.

One example of this new generation of digital books presented in the article are the "flexbooks" developed by a nonprofit group, CK-12 Foundation, with a mission to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the U.S. and worldwide.

Neeru Khosla, the founder of CK-12 Foundation explains in the article the advantages of the flexbooks: “The good part of our flexbooks is that they can be anything you want. You can use them online, you can download them onto a disk, you can print them, you can customize them, you can embed video. When people get over the mind-set issue, they’ll see that there’s no reason to pay $100 a pop for a textbook, when you can have the content you want free.”

It looks like the move to open-source free materials should be fast forwarded in days of budget constrains, but it looks like this revolution will take time, as it tries to revolutionize something which is a significant part the current educational system. It will eventually happen. The question right now is more of "when" than "if".

And there's of course a green angle to this revolution. I'm not sure yet what devices will be used for the digitalized materials, but since a lot of it would probably done on laptops and desktops, it means that not only it will save A LOT of paper, but it will also be more eco-friendly than the current paper textbooks based system (more about the green side of paper vs. digital content can be found here).

Yours,
Raz @ Eco-Libris

Eco-Libris: promoting green printing!