Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

The big Apple

The big Apple

Apple is hoping to take a bite of the textbook market. Rob Buckley reports

When Apple enters a market, it tends to revolutionise it. First the personal computer market with the Macintosh. Then music and online films with iTunes. Then the phone and personal digital assistant (PDA) market, which it turned into one and the same thing with the iPhone. And then the 'tablet PC' market with the iPad. All changed beyond recognition by Apple.
The tech company's announcement in January that it was going to revolutionise the textbook market must have been met with some trepidation by many publishers. The details seemed simple enough. The iPad already had an 'iBooks' application and store for buying and reading ebooks, but iBooks 2 was going to support textbooks as well, as was the iBooks Store. But not just any textbooks, because in conjunction with a new free app for the Mac called iBooks Author, anyone would be able to easily design textbooks that are interactive, with videos, rotatable 3D objects, image galleries, study cards, highlighting options and more. The textbooks can be given away for free, but if they're to be sold, they need to be sold through the iBooks Store.
So textbooks that are better than the ones that came before them, that anyone can make with an application that costs nothing, that can be bought and downloaded onto a tablet device from a single store over the internet and which cost just a small fraction of a paper textbook price - the opportunities are obvious, particularly the chance to sell more copies at reduced costs worldwide. But there are also potential problems: the history of iTunes shows that profit margins could be cut drastically for existing publishers; a monopoly store that can ensure a textbook is only available on a single platform that not everyone can afford or want to own; the possibility of draconian terms and unsustainable models; and the chance for small companies to come in and upset the status quo.
Already, Apple has had to update its licence to make it clear that content published in an iBook can be used in other work, just not the iBook itself, such is the fear of a 'content grab' by the company.
Certainly, the market is there for at least some kinds of interactive textbooks. According to Global Equities Research, within three days, users downloaded more than 350,000 textbooks from McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt priced at $14.99 or less. With a US congressional advisory committee on student financial assistance reporting in 2007 that the average student's textbook expenditure "can easily approach $700 to $1,000 today even after supplies are subtracted" and with some textbooks costing $200 each, the appeal for students is obvious; Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner Research, also points out that "five or six textbooks is an extra 30lbs of extra weight to lug around".
Equally, the desire to create these kinds of textbooks is there as well according to Global Equities: some 90,000 users downloaded iBooks Author in those three days.
Genevieve Shore, chief information office and director of digital strategy at Pearson, says interactive textbooks provide new opportunities: "Our hope is that these new kinds of books - and the concoction of educational expertise, beautiful design and technological know-how that make them possible - can play some part in making learning more engaging, more inspiring, more effective."
Pearson has initially published six US high school textbooks as iBooks - at the moment, the iBooks Store only sells textbooks in the US - which it says amounts to 7,000 pages of learning content, 1,000 interactive widgets including 3D animations and presentations, more than 100 videos and 5,000 test questions. But it says there's see "much potential to create these types of programmes for more subject areas, geographic markets, and learning levels".
But even it isn't ready to throw its lot in completely with Apple. The company has "long published many of its textbooks in digital form, giving consumers the choice between digital and print copies and in some case blended products, and this will continue," it says and its "general philosophy is to be device-agnostic, to allow people to consume our content in whatever form and on whatever device they choose. So we do expect to develop similar interactive products for other platforms, but have not yet announced any plans to do so."
Dorling Kindersley, another publisher that has put together content using iBooks Author, is similarly agnostic, despite its initial sales successes. "I'm thrilled and amazed by sales in term of coverage," says deputy CEO John Duhigg. "I'm very pleased with the volumes. But I'm very clear that we have to try to ensure we are on as many platforms as possible. I want our content on Kindle, Nook, and anyone's tablet."
DK sells its ebooks and apps through an agency model, rather than the traditional sales model, so the cut taken by Amazon and Apple is exactly the same. At the moment, iBooks Author simply makes it much easier to create content for the iPad, he says - "It's the first tool traditional editors and designers can use relatively intuitively to create content. You no longer have to rely on third-party developers" - but he doesn't think the likes of Amazon will sit by and not create similar tools for their own platforms.
Indeed, while some US publishers have been enthusiastic, UK academic publishers have been far less enthusiastic. Oxford University Press is "not making a statement at the present time" according to its group communications executive Dan Selinger, while Cambridge University Press's director of corporate affairs, Peter Davison, says, "We take the long-term view that the transition of learning materials to mobile platforms is of great significance to us, and educational publishing in general. We are currently exploring the opportunities for iBooks and enhanced e-books; we're working with and developing for those devices and companies that we think have the best potential. Clearly Apple is one of those, so watch this space."
Ray Barker, a director at education trade body BESA, says iBooks and iBooks Author is something that is far more important to the US market. "We're not so Apple-focused in the UK. Although iPhone and iPad sales have increased, we're not an Apple nation." He argues that while many companies may "bite the bullet because Apple's a worldwide phenomenon", we won't see "swathes of traditional publishing companies giving their all to one supplier in the hope they sell a lot". iPad-penetration, particularly in schools, isn't high enough in the UK to justify the investment by educational publishers in iBooks, although he does see opportunities for niche and specialist publishers who develop products for children with special educational needs. "Special educational needs departments are focused on doing their best for kids and they're prepared to experiment. If a product takes off, they can sell a lot and make a lot of money."
Nik Tuson, director of Avantis, which produces the LearnPad educational tablet, argues that while Apple is affecting the market with its announcements, it won't change it. "Apple's US educational volume licensing isn't available in the UK. 95% of UK [interactive educational] content is Flash-based which the iPad doesn't support, so publishers can't use what they've already invested in." Apple's share of the tablet market is likely to decrease and for its iPad to remain a premium product - iPad pricing begins at £399 while Amazon's Android-based Fire tablet, soon to be launched in the UK, costs $199 - so large-scale uptake by educational bodies is likely to be muted.
Instead, iBooks and the iPad are to be options for the individual in the UK, particularly the university student. "The college market is the most likely at the moment," says Gartner's Michael Gartenberg. "A student is most likely to have the device since the price is prohibitive."
That in turn means e-textbook purchases are likely to be down to the individual, which means a much smaller potential market for publishers, which will have no obvious, simple targets for direct marketing of ebooks. No wonder Pearson argues that its "philosophy is to provide content in whatever form customers want, and we continue to do that. But we don't expect paper books to disappear anytime soon."
While iBooks, the iPad and iBooks Author certainly provide a new platform for publishers to take advantage of, one that can create far greater sales than they'd normally expect, it's likely to be just the first of many platforms and one to be adopted at leisure and not to the exclusion of all others.

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