Digital textbooks to surpass $1 Billion revenue

By siliconindia   |   Tuesday, 20 April 2010, 22:19 IST   |    2 Comments
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Bangalore: A latest survey has brought to light that digital textbook sales in the United States will surpass 18 percent of combined new textbook sales for the Higher Education and Career Education markets. This increase will boost revenues for digital textbooks to more than $1 billion and necessitate a general overhaul of traditional textbook production processes. The growth will also create avenues for new content publishers to enter the textbook market, lead to fundamental shifts in purchasing patterns around learning materials, and expedite the formal adoption of open educational resources to augment premium digital content. The survey is done by the Xplanation. The author of the survey Rob Reynolds says that, "Our five-year projections assume a current market share of 0.5 percent for digital textbooks in the U.S., and an average yearly increase in sales growth of approximately 100 percent over the next five years. We project that growth to taper to approximately 30 percent annual growth for the ensuing five years (2015-2019)." Within the general publishing and education markets, the growth of digital textbook sales will be influenced by factors like digital textbook and e-content pricing, availability of digital textbook content, advances in technology related specifically to digital textbooks, increased growth of online learning, and rise in open educational resources and their use. In addition, the survey says that the increase in e-textbook sales will be driven by a series of hardware and technology trends such as success of the iPad and the tablet form factor in general, increased sales of netbooks and the success of Chrome OS for netbooks, proliferation and continued popularity of e-reader devices and e-reader platforms, growth of the smartphone market. The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) reported that in 2009, e-books accounted for 3.31 percent of all trade book sales in the U.S. up from only 1.19 percent in 2008. Sales of wholesale e-books for February 2010 were $28,900,000 for February, a 339.3 percent increase over February 2009 ($6,600,000). Calendar Year to Date sales are up + 292.2 percent from 2009. The author also says that open source will play an important part. He says, "Beyond the increased availability of digital textbook content over the next five years, we will also see continued growth in the open educational resource (OER) or open content arena. The OpenCourseWare Consortium, which grew out of the M.I.T. project, now includes over 200 institutions worldwide and offers materials from more than 13,000 courses."