Read It and Weep: The College Textbook Shakedown

Reader Jenica Rhee noted by Rewriting the Textbook Market? Smashing! post over on my Architects of Tomorrow blog, which is devoted to my tech leader interview books. She offered me the following infographic (permalink here), and I found it too fascinating to resist. If you've ever wondered why college textbooks are so insanely priced and why change is so slow to come to this market, read on...


Via: OnlineEducation.net

E-reading Rising Among Students

According to a new report from the National Association of College Stores, ebook sales are up 6% among a base of 655 college students compared to last October. Other noteworthy factoids:

• 15% fewer students now use laptops or netbooks to read texts.
• 39% of students now use a dedicated e-reader.
• Of those who owned an e-reader, the models owned were Amazon's Kindle (52%), Barnes & Noble's Nook (21%), Apple's iPhone (17%), and Apple's iPad (10%).

I find it most interesting, though, that 75% of respondents noted that, if given an equal choice, they would still pick paper. I wonder what would happen to this percentage if students were offered ebook versions of the same text for 30% of the paper version's price.

Visualize the Ebook Format Wars

Andrew Savikas at O'Reilly posted an interesting chart today showing his company's ebook downloads broken down by format over the past two and a half years. Clearly, the dominance of Adobe's PDF is thinning under pressure from EPUB and MOBI.

As a Droid owner, I find it interesting that Android as an OS is on fire but Android as an ebook format is pretty lackluster. Perhaps this is because Android has yet to make its initial splash in the tablet space. EPUB, in contrast, is the native choice for Apple devices as well as Sony's Reader, the Barnes & Noble Nook, and the Kobo eReader. Kindle uses Amazon's proprietary AZW format, which is based on MOBI. Interesting that in the last few weeks you can see MOBI eating into EPUB share. Looks like Santa Clause may be heading down Amazon's lane.