Startup Gives Digital Textbooks the Ol? College Try

E-books may be taking off for Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, but there?s one category of printed matter where digital hasn?t made a dent: textbooks.
It?s not for lack of trying. Most textbooks are massive tomes that weigh several pounds, are printed on hundreds of pages of glossy paper, can cost upwards of $100, and are often out of date as soon as they?re printed. You?d think someone would have figured out how to make e-textbooks work ? and plenty of companies have tried.
Yet print still rules, with over 99 percent of the textbook market. But with the rise of tablets and e-readers, software developers and textbook publishers are making yet another effort to take textbooks digital.
Matt MacInnis is one of the new hopefuls. For eight years, he worked at Apple?s education division. But last year, when the iPad was still just a rumor, MacInnis started thinking about starting a digital textbooks venture. He left Apple to follow his dream, and the result is Inkling, which launched two months ago.
Inkling is an iPad app that turns textbooks into bite-sized, illustrated, interactive pieces of media. With Inkling, William Strunk?s Elements of Style is reinvented with humorous hints and cheeky cartoons, while a biology textbook has beautiful diagrams and color photos.
?With the iPad, there?s an obvious opportunity in education,? says MacInnis.
Inkling allows readers to jump into any chapter. Users don?t have to buy the entire textbook: They can just buy a few chapters and later get the entire textbook.
Inkling is just one of the companies looking for a way to make digital textbooks work. Earlier this year, textbook publishers such as McGraw Hill and Kaplan struck a partnership with software company ScrollMotion to bring textbooks to the iPad.
Digital textbooks have been struggling to take off for nearly a decade. Publishers were slow to adapt print editions to PCs and professors don?t usually recommend digital textbooks to their students. And for all their texting and video games, some say, students are not as comfortable with the technology as you might think.
?There is the issue of trust,? says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, which looks at use of IT in education. ?Even though we think of this generation of students as being wired, they have dealt with print all their life for core education. They know how to master that but they are less certain of electronic material.?
Last year, digital textbooks generated an estimated $40 million in sales, according to Xplana, an educational software and consulting company. This year, it is expected to grow to $80 million ? but that?s still just 1 percent of the total higher education textbook market. By 2015, Xplana estimates digital textbooks will be 20 percent of the total market.
But a lot has to change in the next four years before that prediction can become reality.
Why haven?t digital textbooks taken off?
Despite their promise, digital textbooks haven?t taken off for two big reasons: ease of use and price.
Publishers have long been offering some textbooks for PCs but these digital editions have never entirely replaced their paper cousins.
Digital textbooks haven?t become really popular because they aren?t easy to use on computers, says MacInnis.
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