Inkling, Follett Deal Expands Store Reach

Inkling set out to reinvent the way people learn. The San Francisco-based start-up wanted to create a better, interactive, and engaging textbook by taking advantage of new technology the Apple iPad provided.

Now, Inkling is teaming with Follett Higher Education Group on a distribution partnership that will make hundreds educational titles available online and in Follett-managed campus stores. Inkling also provides content through Verba, an NMS partner, making its titles available to any store that uses the Verba price-comparison tools.

The new Inkling agreement provides students with the option to buy entire Follett e-titles or use Inkling’s “Pick 3” pricing method that allows the purchase of just three digital chapters instead of the entire book, along with the flexibility to pay for the titles using financial aid or campus cards.

For the moment, only students using iOS devices, such as the iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, will be able to access the titles. But Inkling is working on an HTML5 application that will expand availability to other gadgets.

“I think the important part here is that Inkling is making its content available via stores,” said Mark Nelson, chief information officer at NACS and vice president of NACS Media Solutions. “Previously, it was only available from them directly or through the Apple channel. It is an interesting example of a company who has become more in favor of working with the stores once they learned more about us as a retail channel. There are other avenues through which they can reach stores as well—and if they want their content adopted, ultimately they need some help from the stores.”

Inkling Announces New Publishing Tool

Inkling recently announced the launch of their new Inkling Habitat, an e-book publishing tool.  According to the company, the new tools are more versatile, faster, and have more interactive capabilities than Apple’s iBooks Author.  The functions of Habitat include 3-D rendering, guided tours, HD Videos, interactive quizzes, and more.  What the company claims is amazing about Habitat is that with a click of the button it can push updates to every target platform at once, with customized, device-specific layouts.  It also allows for collaborative authoring since all work is taking place in the cloud.  Inkling will be offering Habitat products and services to publishers.

This is not a tool for stores, so why should we care?  Well, such tools continue to make it easier to create and package Native Digital content for course materials.  One thing disruptive technologies do when entering an industry is make the prior process or approach easier, faster, cheaper, or just plain better.  These and similar technologies could represent a shift in how course materials are created by publishers in the future.  Stores must ultimately determine how they gain access to and then help sell or distribute the content that tools like these produce. 

On the Inkling side, as we see them do more work with retailers, it could provide a future opportunity that allows the store to help faculty create more Native Digital content.  At the same time, Inkling has mostly been on Apple devices up to this point.  If they are going to start producing content, particularly educational content, for other platforms it raises the risk that they may need to do more direct work themselves to address accessibility requirements and concerns. 

Jobs Wanted to Transform Book Industry

Steve Jobs' new biography talks about how Mr. Jobs wanted to transform the textbook industry, according to this NY Times article.  The story talks about how Mr. Jobs met with the major players in the publishing industry to discuss how publishers could bypass the costly process of state certification of textbooks for K-12 if books were published on the iPad.  Mr. Jobs is quoted as saying, “ We can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”  The idea, according to the biographer,  was to employ textbook writers to develop digital versions of their textbooks on the iPad.

In some ways, this sounds much like the type of work that Inkling is doing -- working with some of the top textbook publishers and taking a number of top textbook titles and moving them into the Inkling platform.  That platform at least initially is mostly focused on delivering its content to the iPad environment.  Parts of the business model within Inkling, and how they source some aspects of development, are quite interesting.  Seeing some of Steve Jobs' vision here play out within Inkling is not a big leap, as the CEO of Inkling, Matt McInnis, is a former Apple employee. 

Such developments should again give college stores pause.  The stores have value to provide to these transactions, but how do they become integrated into the new channel for content distribution? 

An Inkling of textbook innovation

Many of us are probably aware of tech start-up Inkling.  If not here is a great collection of videos on the company.  They now have interactive versions of dozens of textbooks, geared toward tablet devices, developed with cooperation from leading textbook publishers -- and representing some of the largest textbook adoptions.  The videos are something all stores should watch -- partly to understand how these technologies are marketed to students, and also to help stores gain a quick glimpse into the beginning of the future for the digital textbook: