Publishers and E-books: making haste slowly?

May 20, 2021 Terry Freedman

e-stuff, by Terry Freedman

The following announcement appeared in a newsletter I published in February 2001:

Educational publishers discover e-learning According to a recent article in The Bookseller, a number of UK publishers are about to start developing new digital technology and content for education. For example, Nelson Thornes’ owner, Wolters Kluwer, intends to invest at least £1m a year in this area. Hodder and Stoughton Educational has developed a number of websites to support certain courses, while the Oxford University Press offers interactive materials online to supplement its textbooks. One likely approach by publishers is the subscription model, exemplified by Research Machine’s Living Library and others. If you are concerned about whether your school can afford subscriptions (The Living Library costs £1299 pa), there is money in the pot because 15% of the school’s National Grid for Learning (NGfL) funding has to be earmarked for content. So if your school receives such funding, you may be able to use some of it for online subscriptions or other digital resources. Interestingly, according to an article by Terje Johansen in Inklings Issue 7.3, Forrester Research in the USA predicts that ebooks will be a big flop for the big publishers. However, they do lessen the gloom by stating that ebooks, Print-on-Demand and digital textbooks will force publishers to issue their wares in different formats at the same time (at least, I assume that is what they mean by “multichanneling”).

Computers in Classrooms #8

Gosh! That was twenty years ago, and I still don’t think publishers have really caught up. Unless they are just being really cynical about the whole thing. Why, for example, are ebooks priced at almost the same level as printed books? (I’ve actually seen a Kindle book priced higher than the print version.) Why don’t more publishers and booksellers give you the digital version when you buy the print one? After all, it doesn’t cost them any more unless you count lost sales, and how many people can afford to buy both versions?

Why don’t more publishers produce books that are multimedia apps?

As for the subscription model, not much is being made of that although it does seem to be becoming a “thing”, especially for self-published authors.

Perhaps I’ve spent too long in a darkened room staring at a computer screen and writing my own articles and books, so maybe I’ve missed stuff. But it seems to me that most publishers are nearly always behind the curve when it comes to technology.