BookRiff Announces ‘Build Your Own Book’ Platform Launch

PublisherWeekly (PW) reports that, BookRiff, a novel digital publishing company will go live with their technology on October 6^th.  BookRiff’s platform uses an ePub reader and allows users to create their own book by piecing together chapters, articles, or other content.  Users pay for content which is delivered in a variety of formats such as print-on-demand and content rights holders are given royalties.   According to PW, publishers who will provide content include O'Reilly Media, Harvard Common Press, Stonesong Press, Sterling Publishers, EnThrillEntertainment, as well as Douglas & McIntyre, Greystone Books and New Society Publishers.

There are a growing number of competitors to enable campus creation of "mashable" books -- a category we traditionally refer to as custom publishing or coursepacks.  Cengage has probably received some of the greatest press around this concept, but AcademicPub, BookMasters, LiquidText, Xanadu, and others offer comparable solutions.  As custom publishing grows as a way to preserve market share, grow revenue, and decrease course materials costs for students, it is likely that others will enter this space with potential solutions for faculty and stores. 

E-Books Not So Popular at CSUF

Here is an article an article from The Daily Titan, the school newspaper at California State University Fullerton, that reports that e-books are not catching on at their campus.  While the bookstore offers e-textbooks, CSFU students are not taking that option when purchasing their course books.  “If there are 100 students in the class, about 3 to 5 will buy the e-books,“ says Text Adoption Manager Mike Dickerson.

One of the reasons for the slow adoption is that there is a significant lack of availability of e-book versions of the most popular textbooks on college campuses, said Jeff Cohen, CEO of CampusBooks.com.  Cohen also said e-book prices aren’t as good as people believe them to be.  Other reason for the lack of enthusiasm about e-books is that publishers make it hard for students to bypass paying for e-books by imposing restrictions that limit e-books’ usage, expiration dates, and printing limits.

Of course, as we have reported on this blog in the past and in presentations elsewhere, there are a variety of other factors also influencing the adoption of digital texts by students.  Many of the larger adoptions are now available through sources like CourseSmart, which has partnered with many campus bookstores.  However, the majority of titles are still not available, or easily available, though a consolidated source.  Digital sales require more consumer and faculty education, due to differences in DRM and licensing terms.  Type of institution also matters, with sales higher among for-profit schools and adult commuting populations.  Student expectations of digital are also not "pdf-equivalents" of the text and in response we increasingly we see more emphasis by publishers being placed on "born digital" versions of course material resources.  In short, there are many reasons why adoption has been slow, but many of those factors are showing signs of shift.

There is also a question around the true size of the digital course materials market.  Take MyMathLab by Pearson as an example.  It probably outsells the leading print textbook product by 3-to-1 (that is in dollars if not units).  It is a top selling product for many stores, but few stores (or publishers) would count that as a "digital textbook sale."  As more products are available in digital format, and as more of those products provide richer learning contexts, digital sales will increase.  There are also a percentage of sales that happen directly through other sources, which college stores cannot track.  A case of "we may not know what we do not know" -- and that relates to market share.  We do not know what percentage of digital sales we are losing to other sources.   Recall that record stores were not seeing big sales of digital music back in 2003.  What a difference less than a decade makes.  What is the true size of the digital course materials market across all digital products (not just .pdf substitutes for print)? 

So my question regarding the original article cited in this story -- were students surveyed to find out if they are using digital course materials, and if so where they were being acquired?  How many students at CSUF are using digital course materials accessed through the library or purchased someplace else?  The number may still be small, but if we are trying to track trends, the data might provide for a more accurate picture.  The move to digital is certainly more a question now of "when" rather than "if." Despite currently low in-store sales it is important for stores to continue to monitor digital sales and experiment to learn how to transition to new forms of content delivery.  Failure to do so will likely mean increased channel obsolescence with time.

BTW -- I tend to consider CSUF a well-managed college store.  My comments are not intended to be a critique of the store's performance around digital, but to provide a different perspective on the low digital sales many stores report.  I know a number of stores take the low sales numbers and use that to justify not doing anything with digital.  Such decisions weaken both the store and the channel in terms of future positioning.  Even well-managed stores like CSUF's find that digital course material sales are not yet comparable to digital trade book sales in other channels, but they are experimenting and tracking so that when the shift does come they will be better prepared with viable solutions.

New Platforms to Access University Press E-Books

Wired Campus reports several online platforms for University-Press Ebooks that are about to be introduced into the market.  These include Oxford Press’s University Press Scholarship Online, ProjectMUSE, JSTOR, and University Publishing Online, a Cambridge University Press’s platform.

Oxford Press announced that its University Press Scholarship Online will includes monographs from the American University in Cairo Press, Fordham University Press, Hong Kong University Press, University Press of Florida, and the University Press of Kentucky, with Edinburgh University Press and Policy Press scheduled to join the project in March 20.

According to Wired Campus ProjectMUSE Ebooks will include more than 14,000 titles from 66 university and scholarly presses.  JSTOR, has more than 20 publishers that are participating and expects to reach 30 by the time  it goes live in the summer of 2012, says the article.

University Publishing Online, Cambridge University Press’s has publishers on board like  Books India, Liverpool University Press, and the Mathematical Association of America, as well as Cambridge University Press.

Happy 100th Anniversary to U of Maine Bookstore!

The University of Maine’s Bookstore celebrates its 100th anniversary thanks to its students, faculty, staff, alumni and friends.   The store stays connected to its constituents by getting involved in annual events and donates proceeds from sales of specific items, such as the Holiday Ornament Series, to campus-sponsored student organizations.  The store also regularly help to support fundraisers, volunteerism, alumni events and new student orientation.   The bookstore’s offerings include textbook options such as rentals and eBooks, and the Computer Connection.

2000% Increase in Textbook Rental

eCampus, an online textbook retailer, issued an interesting press release reporting an observed surge of textbook rental to the tune of 2000% increase over the last two years.  eCampus says that one in five of all college textbook purchases online today through their site are textbook rentals in contrast to online rentals accounting for just 1 percent of all sales two years ago.   According to eCampus, new textbooks account for 40 percent of textbook sales on their site  down from 71 percent four years ago.  eCampus also reports that the purchase of used textbooks on their site has grown steadily over the past three years, from 29 percent of all sales in 2009 to more than two-thirds (37 percent) today.

Barnes & Noble Partners with Self-Publishing Company Lulu.com

This week B&N and Lulu.com announced a partnership to help self-publishing authors more easily publish and distribute their works via NOOK eReader.  Lulu.com is a self-publishing company with 1.1 million authors and 20,000 titles in their catalogue each month. The company provides a publishing services for writers in exchange for a percentage of profits. "This partnership is another step in our passionate effort to help Lulu creators reach more readers and sell more books," says Bob Young, Founder and CEO of Lulu.  Barnes &Noble VP of eBooks, Jim Hilt commented: "We are excited to partner with Lulu.com to bring its catalog of fantastic eBooks to our rapidly growing community of millions of NOOK owners and readers.

Will e-books create a bigger digital divide?

“Could Abraham Lincoln have become president of the United States in a world in which poor children lack access to physical books?”

A recent article in Technology Review asks this question.  The piece may be best summed up with the following passage:

I challenge anyone reading this to recall his or her earliest experiences with books -- nearly all of which, I'm willing to bet, were second-hand, passed on by family members or purchased in that condition. Now consider that the eBook completely eliminates both the secondary book market and any control that libraries -- i.e. the public -- has over the copies of a text it has purchased.


Except under limited circumstances, eBooks cannot be loaned or resold. They cannot be gifted, nor discovered on a trip through the shelves of a friend or the local library. They cannot be re-bound and, unlike all the rediscovered works that literally gave birth to the Renaissance, they will not last for centuries. Indeed, publishers are already limiting the number of times a library can loan out an eBook to 26.

Herein resides one of the great challenges to ebooks today:  they do not fit our conceptual model of how books and related content worked in the past.  If I buy a song on iTunes, I can burn it to CD, share it with my friends, and more.  The same is not true with ebooks.  I frequently cannot share them, they are harder to discover, and they may even expire after a time period.  The concept of what it means to own a book is changing, and this could have implications for accessibility as well.