“Swelling” textbook costs are once again front-page fodder–this time in the Washington Post.
Often publishers justify the costs by noting all the complexities of today’s textbooks including design. Students have their own counter-arguments, such as that they are captive customers even in the era of Amazon.
Could the economies of e-books help bring the two sides closer together?
Maybe. And it’ll help if textbook publishers look beyond Adobe and other proprietary formats–doomed ahead of time to obsolescence.
Format matters
Within e-books the right format standards would be tremendously useful in turning things around. The nonproprietary OpenReader, for example, will let elaborate sidebars be treated as popups instead, thereby reducing design costs.
What’s more, OpenReader will be reflowable, unlike today’s typical PDFs, and easier to read on tablets and the rest. I know Adobe says it’ll get around to dealing with that reflowability thing. But when? OpenReader, by contrast, will be out in months and be more flexible and cheaper for publishers and consumers alike–not just easier on readers. Moreover, it will offer interactive capabilities, such as shared annotations, that Adobe and other formats lack. Such capabilities often could matter more on the campus than multimedia glitz.
Paper vs. PDF
Meanwhile PDF and the nasty DRM often accompanying it are doing lots of damage to young people’s impressions of e-books. Given a choice between a PDF textbook and a paper one, I’d see the decision as a no-brainer. Paper for sure.
Accessibility: That’s of big concern to us at OpenReader. It will be less expensive than ever to do e-textbooks that meet local, state and federal regulations involving the needs of the disabled.
Detail: OpenReader’s DRM costs, under the system proposed by OSoft, first implementer of the standard, would be a fraction of those of Adobe’s.
Related: Quinn Anya Carey’s great post on the challenges that e-books–er, those wretched PDFs–are facing at the University of Chicago.
