Pearson announced on Monday that they had agreed to sell its US K-12 textbook business to Nexus Capital Management for $250 million. Nexus will pay an initial $25 million and...
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Category: Textbooks & Digital Textbooks
Cengage Launches an e-Textbook Subscription Service
Thanks to textbook publishers pricing themselves out of the market, textbook sales have about a snowball's chance in Animal Farm of surviving the digital transition. Cengage's solution is to launch...
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Barnes & Noble Hates Its Customers, and Wants Them to Suffer
Some retailers like Amazon try their best to make customers happy, secure in the knowledge that a happy customer is a repeat customer. Then there is Barnes & Noble,...
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Why Textbook Publishers Are Running Scared: Survey Shows College Textbook Spending Dropped 17% Since 2007
When textbook publishers filed copyright infringement suits against third-party sellers (and Follett, even), the motivation was obvious. Just ask anyone: non-fiction sales are down (like O'Reilly said) so the...
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Jisc Now Offers Digital Textbooks
Digital library vendor Jisc has found a back door to shove institutional- or site-licensed digital textbooks through. Last week Jisc announced a partnership with Bibliotech, the next doomed digital...
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No, Institutional Licensing is Not the Solution to Textbook Prices
Textbook prices have been rising faster than healthcare for decades. this has inspired the growth in use of open educational resources and even degree programs that don't require paid...
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“Zero Textbook Cost” Degree Programs Are Rendering Paid Textbooks Obsolete
When O'Reilly announced a couple weeks ago that they were closing their ebookstore, they explained that they were simply responding to the existing trend of declining nonfiction sales. They're...
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Textbook Publishers Now Fight Piracy With Seals of Approval
Publishers have been raising textbook prices for so many decades and have driven the price of textbooks so high that they have created a profitable opportunity for counterfeiters. There's serious...
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Site Licenses, Er, Inclusive Access, Will Save Textbook Publishing
If you wait long enough, any idea, no matter how old, will become new again. Joseph Esposito proved that point with what he calls "inclusive access": I have been...
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Book Cycle Connects Students Buying and Selling Textbooks
When I was in college I usually bought my textbooks online on sites like half.com and then sold them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester....
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Textbook Publishers File Suit Against Amazon Marketplace Sellers for Alleged Piracy
Cengage, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson have started a new round of lawsuits against textbook sellers. The Financial Times reports that this time around the publishers are targeting defendants who sell through...
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Free and Open eBooks Won’t Help Those on the Wrong Side of the Digital Divide
The Washington Post reminded us on Friday that the recently announced federal Open eBooks program could fail to reach those who need it the most. While this program enables...
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McGraw-Hill Pulps College Textbook Over Disputed Historical Maps of Israel
Following protests from activists, textbook publisher McGraw-Hill announced earlier this month that it was withdrawing and planned to destroy a political science textbook, Global Politics: Engaging a Complex World. The...
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B&N Ed Retires Its Digital Textbook Platform, Replaces It With VitalSource
Following two years of torturing students with a mostly non-functional platform, B&N Education announced on Tuesday that it was throwing in the towel. The company announced in its quarterly...
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Students Say Textbooks are too Expensive – Could an Open Access Model be the Answer?
For university students, textbooks have been both a saviour and a bane. Having most of the essential readings in a single volume enables students to access resources easily. Despite...
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