“It may be the season for graduation parties and commencement speeches, but colleges and universities are already prepping for next year, even in the bookstore,” Pullen reports. “Next fall, during opening weekend, students will once again file into university bookstores to purchase course materials, school supplies, and a college sweatshirt or two.”
“While the university licensed gear may seem like a throw-in, it’s big business for colleges and their coffers,” Pullen reports. “But as the higher education industry plans for a future involving digital content delivery to devices like Apple’s iPad, these college-branded impulse purchases – and perhaps even college bookstores – may quickly become a thing of the past.”
Pullen reports, “Should students demand content on the iPad, bookstores will be locked out. Apple’s current App Store and iBookstore sales models give publishers the lion’s share of a 70-30 revenue split, and cut out the schools entirely. Meanwhile, in bookstores’ current distribution model, colleges pocket, on average, 33% of the price of a new book.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Change is the one constant. Universities should be working with Apple to stock iPads – along with Macs, iPhones, and iPods – in their campus bookstores.
I’m working on a second masters and currently, I’ve found two of the four textbooks available for the ipad… through the kindle app. Not the iBook store.
Whatever it takes to bring the cost of textbooks down…
There’s plenty of other stuff the “bookstores” can sell. They’ll be fine. Better than a regular (non-campus) bookstore.
This really shows that the writer sees huge sales for the iPads at universities.
Based on many of these recent “Concern” articles re: flash, iAds and now universities…it seems a lot of these folks see the iPad as being immensely influential and successful in the coming months/years.
Very interesting take from these people.
College bookstores should have only the student’s interest in mind.
iPad would serve them well.
University Bookstores have been a racket for far too long. It’s about time the people had more choice.
I tried to get books for my son for summer semester on his ipad but the cost was still way too high for electronic versions. Used texts are still much cheaper. Until the prices get better that will be an issue.
Keep in mind that Barnes & Noble runs a great many of these campus book stores. B&N;is the one at risk here.
The idea is to enable the cost of the book to the student to be reduced as several layers of distribution and retail costs are eliminated. If the College bookstore was getting 33% of the cost a book, then students should be demanding that their iPad e books cost at least 1/3 less than the printed book.
They could look into the website. Offerings for Alumni and students online. Download your professor’s lecture to your iPad. Think Differently.
Putting college text books onto iPads was my very first thought when this thing was introduced, the iBook app introduced and the price point set. Honestly it’s brilliant and the college kids could save a fortune in text book costs. Here’s how I see it working:
Schools: wrap a portion of the cost of the iPad into tuition. Every student gets an iPad as part of enrollment. Students then have the option of (a) purchasing their texts from the iBook store or (b) RENTING their texts from the iBook store. Renting comes in various durations to accommodate the length of semesters or trimesters. Either way, the cost of textbooks on the iPad comes at a fraction of the cost of the bookstore texts.
Cost-wise everyone wins. The students pay less, publishers can charge less for the same profit because of the low overhead.
What needs to happen with the iBook app though is the capability to take notes in the margin or elsewhere in the book. Highlighting is fun and I’m glad it’s there but without the capability to take notes it won’t fly as a replacement for texts.
I teach graduate students in the California State University system. As I develop syllabi for the courses I teach, I am really sensitive to the costs for texts. Each academic quarter, students may pay hundreds of dollars for each course.
Now, the publishing companies, in hopes that we will adopt their texts and require our students to purchase them, provide us (faculty) with courtesy copies. This has been very useful, and quite frankly does play a role in determining which texts will ultimately be adopted for courses.
That said, I have a Kindle and my iPad 3G is on order. I attempted to get texts for the current courses I’m teaching on my Kindle. I noted a couple things. First, there are a limited number of texts used in my discipline (public administration) available in the e-format. And the few that are available aren’t significantly less expensive than the print copies. Second, the publishers haven’t developed the mechanism yet for providing desk copies (courtesy copies) to faculty in e-format. I think once they start doing that, faculty members will begin pushing the e-format to their students.
Will the brick and mortar university bookstores like this? Well, many of them are actually contracted out these days. These are for-profit entities that will not relinquish their revenue source easily. For me, however, I will gladly use and urge my students to use the e-versions if the publishers would make them available.
@ Jim…
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. The ability to append notes is critical – even for me as a faculty member.
Grade school through grad school, the iPad marks the death of the back pack as it brings the book into the future.
The universities have complete control over getting a share of the action. They ultimately select or don’t select a textbook for use. No cut, no selection. Seems pretty straightforward.
Our university bookstore was sold to a “third party” ages ago….. So really we don’t lose anything if they’re put out of business. I expect this is true with many other universities.
Unfortunately, here’s what’s going to happen:
University Bookstores WILL get cut out of the deal, only this will not translate to savings for the student. Rather, the textbook publisher will offer the textbook for iPad and charge close (if not equal) to the dead-tree version.
University bookstores will still contiue to sell books, but will have more of a focus on the “Instructor Packets” (you know, those badly-copied wads of 20-year-old articles that the profs slap together and sell at the bookstore as a “required text”), which will probably go up in price, to compensate for the loss of kickbacks that the profs (who are also getting cut out of the distribution chain) will suffer.
End result: Publishing companies keep more profit, college bookstores will raise the margins on everything else, profs will rail against it, and students will continue to pay out the nose for textbooks which have no quality control.
I was an undergrad when the HP 35 calculator came out in the early seventies, followed quickly by a slew of cheaper calculators. As an engineering student, I wanted one; but couldn’t afford it. My dad did get me some TI model. But what I missed entirely was that the market for slide rules would collapse. It only took about one year for slide rules to disappear from the campus bookstores. But they were replaced by all the various calculators, at least.
I have no doubt the textbook industry will go through some “interesting times” now that the iPad is available. And perhaps some downsizing is in order. After all, I remember being shocked at the $100 price tags on some books, and that was in the 1970s! But the bookstores sell more than books, and they will survive in some fashion.
This will open the door for forward-thinking universities to take advantage of the iPad. How about note services now for the iPad, with the university getting a cut? Professors of the university can publish their own textbooks cheaper and more easily.
Sure, traditional textbook sales will be hurt. But students tried to find a way around buying books anyway.
I have never purchased a text book from the college book stores. They are a complete rip off and do not exist in any way to help the students. I buy all my books from either textbooks.com or amazon.com. Used or new they are always cheaper than even the used alternatives from the college book stores.
So my question is: How is the iPad going to kill them?
My assertion: They’re already killing themselves.
Heh, hard to justify 75 to 100 bucks for a PDF file…
I have also noticed the lack of technical books, specifically programming, on iBooks. Hopefully this will improve in the near future.
Piss on the campussy bookstore. Hated em from the beginning. Die, dinosaur, die.
“MacDailyNews Take: Change is the one constant. Universities should be working with Apple to stock iPads – along with Macs, iPhones, and iPods – in their campus bookstores.”
I ran the Apple Resale Program in 1991 at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where I easily sold 1/4 Million Dollar’s worth of Macs in 3 months (IIci). There was an Apple office on Kruseway in Lake Oswego for Higher Education and the training was fantastic. I spent 3 hours per day just filing new materials from Apple and Microsoft (also the M$ rep, Office woohoooo back then).
There was a thriving academia fest with Apple in those days, and students / faculty / depts got a nice discount.
I think the iPad and its evolutions will usher in a return to those glory days in education and spread to business.
I sorely wished they came out with an iPad when I was in college. Buying books at full price and professors not allowing the previous edition (partly because they had their hand in the creation of the book), then selling them back at less than 25% or less, or even taking them back at all. Thirty-second edition? It’s by far the biggest scam in education.
Good riddance to them and long live the ePub and PDF formats! Long live the iPad!
College bookstores have been becoming irrelevant anyway haven’t they? At least that seems to be the case on my campus. More and more students are looking for the lowest price online and fewer are buying their books at the campus bookstore. Seems to me the colleges need to push for their “campus bookstore” as a store within a store at the iBookstore. This would make it easier for students to find the books for their courses and would also allow the schools to advertise their school specific wares (sweatshirts etc.). Whatever the case, I don’t expect to see the cost go down. As long as the publishers set the price and students must buy the books, the price will remain high.