Apple Move Will Spark Flurry Of New Companies, Content In Education Market

[Commentary] eTextbooks are a transitional product, accounting for only 2.8% of the $8 billion US textbook market in 2010. The vast majority of digital textbooks are not very innovative; they’re essentially print replicas with digital extensions like highlighting, search, and annotation. The iPad—which now outsells Macs in schools, according to Apple—is capable of much more than what has previously been produced, and Apple hasn’t been satisfied with the status quo. On Jan 19, Apple demonstrated iBooks2, a new textbook experience for the iPad; these new textbooks can be created using iBooks Author.

iBooks2 will solve two product strategy problems for publishers:

1. Production cost. Companies like Inkling are doing quite well helping publishers take their education apps to the next level. The problem is that publishers’ content creation and production processes are still optimized for print, not digital, so working with Inkling is expensive (in terms of publishers’ labor, not necessarily Inkling’s fees). So most publishers opt to create a small number of new apps, and settle for digital replicas or “enhanced eBooks” of everything else.
2. Discoverability. When publishers do create digital products, they complain that students can’t find them. For example, on Amazon, shoppers need to scroll past the regular eBook to find the enhanced one, and it’s not immediately evident that the enhanced product justifies the higher price. Apple’s iBooks2 now has a brand new textbook category, and will centralize distribution of iBooks and make products more discoverable than they are today.