A pair of thieves have been arrested on the charge of stealing $10,000 worth of textbooks from Fayetteville Technical Community College, which is located in North Carolina. Brandy Marie Yarbrough...Continue reading
Category: Textbooks & Digital Textbooks
Pearson Sells Off Its K-12 US Textbook Division for $250 Million
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 a...Continue reading
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 subscription...Continue reading
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, a...Continue reading
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 publishers...Continue reading
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 textbook...Continue reading
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 textbooks....Continue reading
“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 not...Continue reading
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 money...Continue reading
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 involved...Continue reading
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. This...Continue reading
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 Amazon’s...Continue reading
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 educators...Continue reading
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 college...Continue reading
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 filing...Continue reading