The latest in the Publishers Weekly/ Digital Book World free Webcast series, "Digital Textbooks: Innovations From the Academic Business Model" featured panelists Matt MacInnis, CEO, Inkling, Eric Frank, co-founder, Flat World Knowledge, and Brett Sandusky, director of product innovation for Kaplan Publishing. The webcast was moderated by Digital Book World's Matt Mullin.
Right away, the panelists were quick to distance their digital textbooks from traditional, physical books: MacInnis said, "We don't pretend to be a book, we go beyond the limitations of a book," while Frank stated that at Flat World Knowledge, they like to think of themselves as a "disruptive publisher."
At Inkling, MacInnis drew the distinction between digital and physical textbooks in a number of ways, including the fact that digital is hierarchical in structure and that there is no set path to access the content. For Inkling, digital textbooks are "modular" rather than "monolithic," meaning that digital textbooks don't need to be sold as a huge, total textbook--they can be sold by the chapter instead.
Flat World Knowledge, whose motto is "Open Textbooks by Expert Authors," has "four bets" that dictate their strategy: high-quality textbooks; open licensing, allowing faculty to make changes to the content; student's right to decide which platform they want; and cost. Flat World incorporates a user-friendly interface for faculty members to revise and annotate content. So far, their plan is working said Frank who shared the most staggering statistic of the discussion: when a digital pilot textbook was tested on three courses, the results showed that the course completion percentage increased between 10% to 15%.
Kaplan Publishing had a bit of a different experience than Inkling and Flat World, being a traditional publisher, but even for them, taking their textbooks into digital has come with the standard reevaluations of practices, incluidng changes in content acquisition, the product pipeline, and the skill sets for employees.
When the point of iteration was brought up, Sandusky pointed out that the traditional textbook publishing model has completely changed. Before digital, he said, publishers would work for a long time on a textbook and then have a huge launch. "If the book failed," he said, "you'd write it off and say you tried." But with digital, publishers have ways to make the books better. "You will get feedback and you have to use it," Sandusky said.
All the panelists agreed that this was the main difference with digital: that publishing has become an ongoing venture with continuous opportunities for improvement, thanks to the two-way communication with readers.
The discussion's archive is available until August 16 and can be found here.
