Earlier today, I talked about modifying e-books to correct mistakes not caught before publication. But there is another reason to modify e-books, and this one practical rather than theoretical.
College instructors often find that the commercially-available textbooks are not the best fit for their classes. For the most part, they make do by choosing specific reading assignments and passing out hand-outs or other supplementary material.
The New York Times reported yesterday on an electronic textbook initiative Macmillan is introducing. Called DynamicBooks, this program will let professors customize e-textbooks to be better-suited to their classes. Not only can they make large changes, they can change or remove anything, right down to paragraphs.
There have been a number of customized print textbook initiatives before, but Dynabooks is the first that allows such fine-grained changes.
“Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” said Brian Napack, president of Macmillan. “And we don’t even look at it.”
And the e-book editions will be much cheaper than traditional textbooks, too; one title is priced at $134 for the standard print edition but only $49 for the e-book. Macmillan’s senior vice president for digital content, Fritz Foy, says outright that this is because they cannot be resold used the way printed textbooks can.
(Imagine that! Someone from Macmillan saying that e-books—or at least a certain kind of e-books—should be significantly cheaper than the print version!)
DynamicBooks can currently be read on-line or downloaded for use on laptops or iPhones. The general manager of DynamicBooks said they were negotiating with Apple on iPad versions.
The current textbook market is dysfunctional in so many ways. Even if dynamic content weren’t available, eBooks offer a superior alternative. A majority of textbooks are resold, which means the first sale has to be at an outrageous price because if they don’t recover costs the first semester, they’re out. And publishers play silly edition games (which cost them plenty) just to see if they can stimulate additional sales.
In contrast, fiction books aren’t marked up outrageously to garner all of the profit in the first semester because resale still affects only a minority of fiction sales. Please note, by the way, that “only $49” would be considered an outrageous price for fiction even though the cost of electrons for a fiction book are essentially the same as for a textbook.
Another reason electronic textbooks are a good idea–students should be able to keep their texts and use them as references in their working life (or in grad school for the professional students among us). Today, the prices are so high you almost have to sell your books to afford next semester’s.
Bottom line, electronic textbooks are a great idea and the current textbook market is broken. The current fiction market is not an exact parallel although it’s also broken in so many ways. I, for one, don’t set affordable prices because eBooks can’t be resold, I set affordable prices because I think that’s what books should go for…I charge what I’d like to pay.
Rob Preece
Publisher