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"Four major textbook providers-Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons-today announced that they will build tighter links between their advanced e-textbook platforms and Blackboard's popular course-management system. Blackboard announced a similar deal with McGraw-Hill last year. So the company now has partnerships with the five dominant textbook publishers. For students, a major benefit will be the ability to get to the publishers' e-textbooks and online assignments through the campus network without having to create new logins and passwords. For professors, the new links will make it easier to push students' grades on online quizzes from the publishers' e-textbook systems to the gradebook they use on the Blackboard system."

This is a real plus for BB.

"A month or so before back-to-school season begins in earnest, Amazon has jumped into the lucrative college textbook market with Kindle Textbook Rental. Amazon claims students can save as much as 80% off textbook list prices by renting from the Kindle Store. The company is offering tens of thousands of textbooks, which students can rent for periods ranging from 30 to 360 days. Amazon has also extended its Whispersnyc technology so that students can access all their notes and highlighted content in the Amazon Cloud, even after the rental agreement is over."

Textbook rentals at up to 80% off the hard copy price. Wow!

BCampus is moving forward with open textbooks. This means FREE textbook for students!!!

A blog post with helpful tips on publishing an open textbook. Written for BCampus and their open textbook initiative, but most steps relate to publishing in general

"The Rental Phenomenon In the past two years, the post-secondary textbook rental market has exploded. Driven by the outcry over book prices, federal legislation, readily available pricing information on the Internet, and sophisticated web-based rental management platforms, old and new competitors are disrupting the $10 billion college textbook business. Book rental isn't really a new phenomenon-a few college stores have been renting books since the Civil War. The National Association of College Stores (NACS) proclaimed fall 2010 as the "Year of the Rental." Players include long-timers like Follett and Budgetext, institutional stores and fast-growing start-ups. BookRenter, started in 2008, netted $40 million from investors in a funding round this past February. Chegg, started in 2007, has raised $200+ million in venture capital and attracted senior management from Yahoo and Netflix. The same drivers are growing trade in used books, eBooks, and online instructional content. Rental is also driving new business models for sourcing and distributing educational materials that may carry the industry forward into digital. Having book inventory isn't necessarily required-at least one high-flying firm, BookRenter, exists mainly as an online marketplace. Read on to see how this change in distribution is impacting the higher education market. Next month we'll look at what all this means for K-12."

Very cool announcement. It will be interesting to see if textbook prices will drop? I have been super impressed with some books on the iPad and others are super lame. With the new authoring tool it will be interesting to see what we can do with our own content!

I think this post puts the iBook announcement (and Apple's role in education) into perspective: http://www.hackeducation.com/2012/01/19/apple-and-the-textbook-counter-revolution/

"Nature Education, the educational wing of the Nature Publishing Group which also runs Scitable, one of the largest science publishers in the world - is hoping to resolve this with the release its first ever science textbook. It's called the Principles of Biology, and for a $49 lifetime access, students receive a constantly-updated biology textbook, for less cost."

"After trying out the Apple iPad for a short period--about three weeks--three out of four college freshmen said they'd be willing to purchase an Apple iPad personally if at least half of the textbooks they used during their college career were available digitally, according to the results of a classroom poll at Abilene Christian University. According to Scott Perkins, coordinator of mobile learning research in the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning at the Texas university, a similar willingness to purchase the devices was borne out among participants in semester-long pilots, which included both graduate and undergraduate students."

"Determined to make introductory college science courses more manageable for students, two professors at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC, are developing a digital textbook based on the free, open-source learning management system Moodle. "

"Even though e-textbooks make up a small portion of the bookseller's business, that market is likely to grow in the next several years, and teaming up with Microsoft will strengthen its ability to grab a larger share of the college bookstore market, Mr. Iannone said. One of the first new features the joint venture will offer is a Windows 8 application for Nook, Barnes & Noble's e-book reader."

"The number of college students who say they own tablets has more than tripled since a survey taken last year, according to new poll results released today. The Pearson Foundation sponsored the second-annual survey, which asked 1,206 college students and 204 college-bound high-school seniors about their tablet ownership. The results suggest students increasingly prefer to use the devices for reading. One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years-a 15 percent increase over last year's survey"

Very interesting change in student ownership of tablets - and attitudes about textbooks.

It is very difficult to predict trends in edu tech with accuracy but if there is one safe bet, it is that tablets will soon dominate the campus scene, and print is on the way out.

free - open access textbooks in Business, Science, Math, Professional and Applied Sciences, and Humanities and Social Sciences

I'll be interested to see how the mandated etextbooks turn out. And it's very interesting to see a state step in to mandate such a step.

Summary of Results This summary highlights the major conclusions from a nationally representative online poll of 1,214 college students and 200 college-bound high school seniors in the United States. The Pearson Foundation Survey on Students and Tablets was conducted by Harris Interactive from March 8 through 31, 2011. The major conclusions are as follows: 1. College students believe that tablet computers will transform learning. 2. A majority of students in both college and high school are interested in owning a tablet. 3. College students who own tablets believe that the devices are valuable for educational purposes. 4. On average, students prefer print over digital format for both textbooks and leisure reading. Students who own tablets, however, are far more likely to favor digital books over print. Since

This tool is suggested by BCampus for publishing an open textbook

"What are some of the attributes of eText, and what are the related issues institutions looking into eText are considering? The creation of fully interactive, technology-robust eText (not simply a scanned copy of a paper textbook) should include the following components, each of which should be considered by institutions planning an eText implementation: "