Survey Finds Tablet Users Buy Content

In the study A Portrait of Today’s Tablet Users—Wave II, the Online Publishers Association (OPA) found that adoption of the electronic gadgets in the United States is up from 2011, and still rising, and that the vast majority of people use the devices to access content and information.

The online survey from the OPA and Frank N. Magid Associates Inc. reached 2,540 individuals between the ages of 8 and 64 from March 19-26, 2012. It found that 67% of those surveyed used tablets to surf the web and 66% checked their e-mail. Other primary activities include watching videos (54%), getting weather information (49%), reading national news (37%), and viewing entertainment content (36%).

The report found that 74% of users use their tablets daily, with 60% using it several times each day. In addition, tablet users spend 13.9 hours per week on the device, 92% of video watched on a tablet involve news and entertainment clips, 23% of all tablet applications downloaded in the past year were paid apps, and that the tablet app market doubled in size from $1.4 billion in 2011 to an estimated $2.6 billion this year.

“The growing base of tablet users is also showing a healthy appetite for paid content with 61% having purchased tablet content in the past year,” said Pam Horan, president of the OPA. “Considering tablets have only been available for a little over two years, the findings of this study truly underscore the possibilities for publishers to grow their business as consumers are willing to open their wallets in order to have original content at their fingertips.”

Course Materials on a 'Pay-for-Performance' Basis

Western Governors University (WGU), an accredited nonprofit online university, is partnering with McGraw-Hill Education on a new way to provide learning tools to its students on a “pay-for-performance” basis. The program makes both printed and digital course materials available to WGU students, while McGraw-Hill earns fees based on student performance in classes using its resources.

WGU students will be able to access e-books and learning tools for online courses using McGraw-Hill’s LearnSmart software. The university will pay a discounted flat fee for the materials used, along with a premium for each student using the material who earns a grade of “B” or better on WGU competency exams for the class. This program is different because it is not based on the number of students enrolled in a course.

“This partnership with McGraw-Hill Education is consistent with our goals—to find innovative ways to reduce the cost and improve the quality of higher education,” University President Robert Mendenhall said in a press release. “In addition, it helps support our objective of reinforcing accountability among our partners as well as our students.”

The company expects to make “10 or 20 percent less” than it would if it charged for course materials based on enrollment, according to Tom Malek, senior vice president of learning solutions and services in an interview with Inside Higher Education. For taking on some responsibility for student performance, McGraw-Hill will receive intelligence from WGU on how students are using the content.

WGU currently charges a flat tuition rate for a study program, covering all coursework used by a student and learning resources except printed textbooks. Some programs also have a special fee in addition to program costs, such as the one-time program fee of $350 that is added to the $3,250 per-term charge for its nursing programs.

“We desired this model for quite some time,” Steve Klingler, vice president of student experience at WGU, told Inside Higher Education. “It aligns (McGraw-Hill’s) interests perfectly with ours and the students. We’re not content to buy the book—we want the students to actually learn from the book and pass the assessment.”

Digital ≠ Free

The statement that “Information wants to be free,” is attributed to Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand. Unfortunately, many consumers and even some digital activists today seem to forget that Brand’s very next utterance was “Information also wants to be expensive,” a truth known all too well by publishers, IT staff, and college stores and other content retailers.

As this post on The Scholarly Kitchen blog notes in great detail, the storage and delivery of digital content has costs. Maintenance of current digital warehousing and development of future methods both involve highly skilled professionals and complex equipment. Also—cat videos on YouTube notwithstanding—most content creators need or at least hope to be paid for their efforts. Even producing and disseminating those cat videos requires time, equipment, energy, and bandwidth. Add in backup and security.

“If there’s no place to put it, and nobody to manage it, does it exist?” asks blogger Kent Anderson. “Quick, find me all your five-year-old e-mails.”

The real price tag for digital goods may serve as a tempering response to those who demand free e-textbooks based on the notion that removing printing, binding, and shipping eliminates all the principal costs of creating course content.

Renooking Your Passion for Reading

Instead of The CITE’s usual Friday video clip, here’s a cautionary tale for these times. No matter how high technology soars in communications, learning, and commerce, the low-tech stuff can still trip you up.

The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported on a Nook e-reader owner who decided to download a copy of Tolstoy’s hefty classic War and Peace. But in reading the e-book version, the man discovered some odd phrasing such as “a bonfire the soldiers had nookd on the road.” There were repeated references throughout the e-book to “nook” used in ways that didn’t make sense.

It turns out the publishing company that produced the e-book for the Nook reader apparently took its Kindle version of the book and used the Search and Replace All functions to swap out references of “kindle” with “nook.”

Of course, the purpose was simply to rebrand the e-book for a different market, but the responsible employee obviously didn’t consider how many times the word “kindle” might appear in a novel written before central heating was invented.

We Want Easy E-Book Loans, Say Libraries

Some of the largest and most influential public libraries in North America banded together June 5 to deliver a manifesto of sorts to e-book providers. The libraries are pushing to make borrowing e-books as fast and easy as borrowing p-books for patrons.

As recounted by Library Journal on The Digital Shift site, more than 70 library systems signed the ReadersFirst Initiative, which focuses on four principles aimed at lifting barriers and restrictions on loaned e-content. Two of the principles call for enabling library cardholders to download e-content in any format to any e-reading device they choose.

The other two principles clamor for integrating all e-book catalogs and all functional processes involving e-books (checkout, placing holds, paying fines, whatever) into one system, preferably the library’s, so that users can enjoy the same seamless experience they have with hard copies. The libraries feel it’s unreasonable to force users to pop in and out of each e-book provider’s catalog to browse and search for titles, and then jump through more hoops in order to borrow a title.

Some integration is already underway but public libraries, at least the ReadersFirst Initiative group, claim it’s not happening quickly enough. However, publishers remain leery of permitting their e-books to even be allowed in libraries at all, much less streamlining the process for borrowers.

Foiling Textbook Pirates with Discussion Boards

A professor of economics at the University of Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras believes he has come up with a solution for textbook piracy, high prices for textbooks, and distribution of royalties for new and used textbooks, all in one.

Joseph Henry Vogel was granted a patent by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for his web-based system for course materials. Here’s how it works, in short: An instructor adopts a textbook and licenses it through the system. Students taking the instructor’s course buy the book and use a unique code in each copy to access a class discussion board. The system tracks the logins as proof of purchase and distributes the royalties. Students who don’t buy the book (or who buy a pirated copy) can’t access the discussion board and hence can’t pass the course.

The patent application reasons that students will want to pass and therefore will comply with purchasing a new copy, forgoing any temptation to pirate the text. The application also presumes publishers will be able to reduce textbook prices because they can count on more sales and can spread the development costs over more copies. A key component is that students must be required to participate on the discussion board as a course criterion, or the whole system falls apart.

Vogel’s patent immediately came under criticism from blog sites such as TechDirt for propping up course materials costs, not alleviating them. But some commenters supported the system, noting that academic publishing, especially in the hard sciences, may collapse without sufficient revenues.

The system does accommodate used copies, although students might not actually save much money going that route. If permitted by the license, students who acquire a used textbook would submit documentation showing where they bought it and would pay a fee to the publisher (the patent suggests 30% of the retail price) to access the discussion board.

Another Way for Publishers to Reach Consumers

A tech management and consulting firm has launched a web service that appears to make it easier for publishers to sell e-books directly to its customers.

The service, called skBookshop.com, helps publishers tap into the 900 million users on Facebook, plus provides a low-cost way to create mobile apps for Android devices immediately, with an app for Apple iOS gadgets coming later this year.

There are fees to use, but publishers are given a password-protected login to a site that allows them to create full-color catalogs with pages for author and book information that links back to the publisher’s web site. The service also provides detailed analytics and tracking information, can collect e-mail addresses, and allows publishers to easily create e-book promotions.

Justin Loeber of CarverTech, the firm that created the service, claims publishers can’t sell directly to customers from the site because rapid development in Facebook and mobile platforms make it difficult to keep up with the coding. At least not yet, and booksellers have to be wondering about the message being sent to visitors who can click on a “buy button” that takes them back to the publisher’s web site to make the purchase.