Mobile + computer = potential higher ed win

While this BlogU posting from Inside Higher Ed doesn’t view the announcement of 70-plus new tablet devices as “the” big story on the education front from CES 2011, it does rave over the Motorola Atrix Android phone and docking system.

The laptop-like docking station acts as keyboard, screen, and battery, with the Atrix providing the OS, memory, and networking—as well as the user’s files, images, videos, and music. All computing occurs on the Atrix. The combination renders the smartphone vastly much more suitable for classroom use.

“The Atrix is a step closer to the dream of a full computer in a mobile device,” states the BlogU post, adding, “…All of a sudden, the mobile device becomes both a consumption and production tool.”

November ebook sales stats

The latest ebook stats are out from IDPF:

According to sales statistics compiled by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), trade eBook wholesale sales from reporting publishers were $46.6M for November 2010, a 129.8% increase over November 2009 ($20.3M), and an increase of 14.5% over the the prior month of October 2010 ($40.7M). Calendar Year to Date sales (11 months) increased 165.3% from $147.9M in 2009 to $392.4M in 2010.

Note that the usual caveats to this data apply -- specifically around the number of publishers contributing data. These numbers are typically seen as a conservative estimate.

Statistics, historical data and information about eBook sales can be viewed at: http://www.idpf.org/doc_library/industrystats.htm (NOTE: the IDPF website is being revamped and this page will not be updated until the new site is launched later this quarter).

Looking for a few good tablets at CES

This turned out to be the Year of the Tablet at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, with as many as 80 different devices launched, all hoping to become the iPad-killer. None are available at this point and some don’t even exist yet. Most will drop by the wayside. (Remember how many e-readers debuted at last year’s CES? How many of them are still viable concerns?)

This InformationWeek special report culls the herd to pinpoint the new devices that, at first glance, seem to have the best shot at competing seriously with Apple’s tablet.

University presses add e-books to stay in the game

To position themselves as scholarly alternatives to Google Book Search’s 12 million-book archive, university presses and academic content aggregators, acting singly or in partnerships, are rushing to create or expand repositories for digital long-form texts. As detailed in this Inside Higher Ed article, JSTOR, the University Press eBook Consortium (UPeC), and Oxford University Press have all recently announced projects aimed at preserving their revenue streams from scholarly content and keeping themselves from being marginalized by the search giant.

Since these groups will target college and university libraries, rather than individual consumers, via the sale of access licenses, they won’t present any actual direct competition to Google. The addition of e-texts to their archives will, as one university press director noted, enable academics to cut through the “fog” of nonscholarly content that results from any Google Books search. With college stores representing a significant portion of University Press sales, perhaps there are ways for the two constituencies to work together on some of these initiatives.

Three R's begin with i

While watching the list of school closings this morning, there was an interesting story on about the use of iPads in one of the local schools. Each of the students in the fifth grade class has been given an iPad. Here are a couple of the more interesting quotes from the story:

The teacher [Bizan] says iPads have improved student performance in spelling and math and student attendance is up.

"It makes people want to learn. It makes people want to come to school," said Rachel Lyman, a fifth grader.

Bizan says about 75 percent of his instruction takes place on the iPad now and he expects in the not-too-distant-future that'll be 100 percent.

Of course, my favorite quote -- or perhaps the one which is most telling, is the following from the classroom teacher:

"Five to six years from now, or 10 years from now, textbooks, I see them being gone and being on some kind of device," said Bizan.

You can find the story transcript or watch the video clip online on our local news station's site.

What College Students Think

Coming up in February the Book Industry Study Group (BISG) will be hosting a half-day conference in NYC entitled What College Students Think: Making Information Pay for Higher Ed Publishing. The focus will be on the changing needs of college students around course materials.

Julie Traylor (who leads OnCampus Research for NACS) and I will be presenting. However, in addition to speakers, the event will feature an exclusive preview into the findings from BISG's recent student survey: Student Attitudes Toward Content in Higher Education. The survey provides a new look into how students currently enrolled in 2-year, 4-year and for-profit institutions perceive and use different types of educational materials in their course of study.

Kelly Gallagher, Vice President of Publishing Services for Bowker commented that "The timeliness of this event, and the relevance of the data presented, will help academic publishers walk away with tangible insights into these areas." The same is likely true for those of us working in the college store industry, or using textbooks in the classroom.

I hope to see some of you there, and we will report back.

Digital publishers and consumers not on the same page

Publishers run significant risks for their future if they don’t bring their approaches to digital content into better alignment with consumer expectations and desires. A Harrison Group survey of 476 publishing professionals and more than 1,800 consumers indicates a wide gap between those two groups when it comes to digital content management, distribution, and intellectual property.

Seventy-four percent of publishers said they prefer a traditional, subscription-based model for digital content, an option preferred by only 13% of consumers. The vast majority of consumers would rather obtain content under a new model, whether unlimited access for a set price, micropayments for smaller chunks, purchase of single copies, or credits that draw down as content is accessed. Consumers also expect to be able to share content freely with other users and among a variety of devices, including e-readers, smartphones, and tablets.