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September 18, 2009, 02:00 PM ET
Free Electronic Textbooks Do Not Hurt Print Sales, Report Says
Making free e-textbooks available to students does not affect sales of the print books, a new report from a publicly funded group in Britain suggests.
But the managing director of a major publishing company is challenging those findings, saying sales of print materials were not as high as expected during the period when e-books were available for free.
A draft of the report was presented at a seminar in London this week. From November 2007 to December 2008, students at 127 British universities were able to access 36 e-books at no charge. According to the report, sales for the titles fell by 18.7 percent from 2006 to 2007, before the study began. From 2007 to 2008, after the study began, sales for the same titles fell 13.7 percent.
The study was conducted by JISC Collections, a service that negotiates with publishers and owners of digital content for British higher-education institutions. Students were able to access books in engineering, business, medicine, and media studies.
Dominic Knight, managing director of Palgrave Macmillan, which owns two e-books used in the study, said the report examined only a small number of e-textbooks. He told the Web site Bookseller.com that when the company “pegged expected print sales against what we got, it was pretty clear there was some falloff, at least for one of the titles involved." He added that, because print textbooks are bought by millions of students, a service that makes the same books available online to those students for free should pay “quite a lot” for the right to do so.
Palgrave Macmillan is part of the Macmillan Group, an international publishing company.
Comments
1. paievoli - September 18, 2009 at 05:10 pm
Of course not McGraw-Hill prove dthat in the 1990's with their Knowledge Store. I was fortunate enough to working their in the 1980's and still had friends at MH. It only enhances the desire for those that still want print. However you need to realize that the impetus for print is going away with the new generation. It is Kubler-Ross time.
Please read my blog...http://patrickaievoli.wordpress.com
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