Publishers Invest in Inkling, Producer of Digital Textbooks

March 23, 2011, 3:01 am

Pearson and McGraw-Hill announced on Wednesday that they will take a minority stake in Inkling. The move is seen as a major endorsement from the publishing industry of the electronic-textbook start-up.

Inkling offers existing print textbooks in a multimedia-rich format designed for the iPad. The company now offers only 14 titles, but officials said it plans to make 100 available by the end of the year.

Despite the explosion of the wider e-book market and high hopes among publishers for the future of e-textbooks, colleges and their students have yet to adopt them in large numbers.

Matt MacInnis, Inkling’s chief executive, said that students have resisted e-textbooks because they have been difficult to use, but that the success of the iPad offers a chance to start over. Inkling’s focus on painstakingly rebuilding textbooks from scratch in an iPad-friendly format, along with their lower price, will make the difference, he said.

“We believe that this market is going to make an about-face sharply in the next 18 months–between this September and next–when people get used to the standards and quality experience they have with Inkling,” said Mr. MacInnis, who worked at Apple before co-founding Inkling in 2009.

Inkling’s approach contrasts with that of CourseSmart, a competitor with a much larger library of titles that creates digital books that largely recreate the format of printed textbooks. CourseSmart’s approach is “a short-sighted folly,” Mr. MacInnis said. “Sticking a PDF on a screen is operating within all of the constraints of the print book and realizing none of the potential of the iPad.”

CourseSmart officials were not available for comment on Tuesday. In an interview last week, Heather Shelstad, the company’s director of marketing, said a lack of awareness among faculty members that digital course materials are widely available was a big factor hampering their wider adoption.

Publishers have hedged their bets in their attempts to find the right form and delivery model for electronic textbooks, by supporting CourseSmart and their own offerings at the same time. Keith Hampson, a higher-education consultant at Alston Road Group, said the publishers’ investment in Inkling was a signal that they wanted to create a more polished product–“more Apple”–that went beyond recreating the printed textbook.

“If you go with Inkling, we’re going to go up-market,” Mr. Hampson said. “That’s a good idea–I think it will actually be of considerably greater value than the current product offerings.”

Inkling officials declined to say whether they had plans to introduce software for platforms other than the iPad, such as Android-based tablets or the Web. But Mr. MacInnis wrote recently that the company would be offering software for “a number of platforms.”

Kenneth C. Green, director of the Campus Computing Project, said he was skeptical that e-textbooks would see a major turnaround on the timeline that Mr. MacInnis suggested. It is not clear that students actually want digital textbooks, he said, and early indications are that few students believe e-textbooks are a better experience.

It’s also not clear that electronic textbooks will cost much less than their printed cousins, he said. Publishers and others “have to thread the needle between the great aspirations and expectations that these products are going to cost less, and bring dramatic added value,” Mr. Green said. “It just hasn’t happened yet.”

The number of organizations and people that need to work together to offer electronic textbooks will make the process long, slow, and painful, he said.

“I’m not hostile to e-books,” Mr. Green said. “I’m just pragmatic.”

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

http://www.scholasticahq.com Scholastica

I’m pretty certain that as ebook software becomes better, ebooks will dominate the classroom. One great thing about Inkling, in contrast to other ebook software, is that the actual visual layout of the pages is exactly what they are in a real textbook. One of the major failures of ebooks thus far (ibooks, kindle) is they don’t take the actual layout of a printed work into account and this likely makes people uncomfortable (consciously or unconsciously).

The collaborative possibilities that students can undertake with inkling books is also very exciting.
bjones_y

One key will be availability. Coursesmart carries 82% of the top 1000 textbooks where Amazon Kindle carries just 15%
sages

Nice works, Prof. Vedder! Not much by way of ethics (plug for your own controversial pamphlet and another for Bauerlein who works for you at the Institute), but boy what transparency. We can see right through you…
sages

Nice work Professor Vedder. Not much by way of ethics (hidden plug for your own controversial pamphlet and another plug for Bauerlein who is your employee at the Institute), but what transparency! We can see right through you…
marktropolis

I tend to avoid making comments to Vedder’s postings. In large part because there’s always so much wrong with them, there isn’t enough time in the day to respond. But I think there are a few key pieces here that Vedder seems to always wish to avoid.
1). How about you resign your tenured position in Ohio and then get back to us about the evils of tenure.
2) Before you start talking about peer recognition of research (or lack thereof) maybe you should get a few more of you own pieces peer reviewed.
3) It’s not like the state university system is this autonomous body that gets to spend it’s money however (responding to “Where state monies are involved, should decision-making authority be left solely to universities’ own discretion?”). Last I checked, the governing bodies for Florida state universities are already pretty tied up in elected official – in other words, the Gov and the state legislature have a considerable amount of power when it comes to what happens at state universities.
4) I’m tired of folks like Vedder cherry picking from the speeches of Tea Party candidates, using snippets to support their own campaigns, and then attempting to distance themselves from said Tea Party candidates. The reality is that neither Scott nor Perry give a rats behind about higher ed. They’ll just use it as a pawn in their own strange power plays – in Perry’s case, he’s “higher ed” agenda is really about cronyism, in Scott’s case, I don’t even know.
5) I think it’s interesting that a so-called economist (the would be Vedder) ignore the economic aspects of the Gov’s position. A highly educated population (regardless of their major) leads to economic development. The cities with the highest levels of solid economic growth over the past 10 years are the cities with musicians, artists, and dare I say, anthropologists. Yes you need people who are trained for specific money making fields (and STEM is one of those, but MBA’s are not), but those people who are making all that money, and buying houses, and paying taxes, like to live in cities that have some cultural activities (i.e., music, theater, art, etc.).
6) Taking 1 thru 5 above, it seems that Vedder is more concerned with his political agenda (which he seldom shares – see comments about transparency in other posts) than he is about being faithful to his discipline.
tech_prof

Who says students should ‘exercise completely free choice’ in what they will study? I would think that smart students would consider their graduation employment options BEFORE they commit to a degree. Students should exercise free choice in choosing their fields of study, with the realization that if your heart is set on studying ‘Ancient French Underwater Basketweaving’ you might have a hard time getting a job after graduation and paying off your student loans.

I believe what Governer Scott is trying to say, and the man needs tact and ethics lessons, is that Florida can’t afford to continue paying for endless degrees that don’t give a return on the investment, i.e. a job. Why does a state fund education? To just educate it’s population? While a more educated populace is a good thing for society, there are more pragmatic reasons. A more educated populace can attract businesses that supply higher paying jobs and taxes to the state’s economy, thereby enriching the states cash flow.

As usual, some academics fail to see that while the idea that education for the increase of knowledge and self edification and satisfaction is nice, there are limits to what the state can fund.
repphd

Did not take long for the “anti-Vedder’s” to surface. Some of those comments border on libel in reference to Scott, I use the word border as I am not a practicing lawyer with a specialty in that area.

I work in Scott’s state, I personnally view him as both pro and con. As far as tenure I would think a decent tenure review proposal that actually has some teeth is a reasonable compromise. I am sure all of you reading this know someone you might characterize as retired in place and might want to be given a nudge or removed for just cause. It is probably a small minority.

Perhaps some readers might go look at the proposal made by the President of FSU to the Texas initiative. The Texas initiative like most other very “simple minded” proposals motivated by simplistic (left or right) views of the human condition was pretty laughable in my opinion. Some interesting alternatives in the FSU document and some of you might find it worth reading. I am sure you can “Google” it.

As far as the anthropology statement, that is unfortunate because generalizations are hard to make, it obviously depends on a lot things. I am sure the odds of an ivy league graduate in anthropology earning income is greater than one at a lesser school in terms of reputation. Education like a lot of other processes can be viewed as input-process-output. Higher quality inputs should lead to higher quality outputs unless the process is bad.
So I would disagree with the conclusion by Vedder, no cheers for Perry, and for Scott, the jury is still out and I personally think some meaningful things will occur in this state in several areas; one can go look at his current legislative agenda. So some of us might wind up giving him a cheer or two.
dmeagher

The substantive point is that if faculty and administrators at publicly supported institutions of higher education do not respond adequately to public dissatisfation, publicly elected representatives will.
Think68

Lots of professors have a “lazy approach” to their work. They do not like to assign papers that they then have to read. They want to teach as little as possible. They hardly keep office hours these days. They do not want to inconvenience themselves–for example, they do not want to teach any night classes.