Facebook, E-book Pricing, and Technology in Education

Welcome to this morning’s Daily Research Update. Today’s themes are Facebook, e-book pricing, and technology in education. If you want more context for this research, take a look at our Education and Technology Trends for 2010. You may also be interested in our Weekly Research Index, or you can follow our live, daily research on our Current News page.

(Click here to see a simple listing of today’s suggested reading)

Someone asked me about the number of Facebook users over the weekend and I happened to know the answer thanks to this article. The answer, of course, is 400 million, with the last 50 million users coming in just two months. This might explain Facebook’s plan to build a real e-mail system and attack Gmail.

Mike Arrington brings us news that Facebook is working on a full-fledged email product, with the aim of eventually killing Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL Mail and other web-based email systems. This is brilliant. Why? Because Facebook is ideally positioned to build a gigantic web-based mail and messaging system. It is much better positioned, in fact, than Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and any other competitor.

Speaking of Google, the DOJ wasn’t all that impressed with the latest Google Book settlement proposal. “In a brief filed late Thursday, the agency said that significant legal problems remain despite the considerable changes Google and authors and publishers have made to it.” The problem, of course, is around fairness. One could say the same thing about the whole video copyright conundrum facing Higher Ed right now. Scott Leslie argues convincingly that we must evolve beyond our current copyright notions, which are pre-digital in nature.

Some are asking if the recent spat between Macmillan and Amazon might not be a precursor to more radical change in book publishing. Whatever the future may hold, in the present it appears that all major publishers will go with the agent model introduced by Apple. Hachette, a third major publisher, is adopting that model, and the floodgates appear to be officially open now.

The whole pricing debate is about disruption vs. short-term profit.

As a quick summary, Amazon has been buying eBooks for its Kindle from the book publishers on a wholesale basis (reportedly around $12 – $15 per book). The publishers are hopeful Amazon would them mark the eBooks up and sell them for the same price as hardcovers, around $18 – $25 each. Amazon, with an eye towards building a large eBook market, and with all of its pricing data culled from its more than 90MM users, believes the right price for most eBooks is $10 or less. And as such, they have been willing to sell many eBooks at a loss, hoping to eventually force publishers to sell eBooks at a lower, perhaps optimal price. They would know. They sell gabillions of items to about 100MM consumers every day. Between them and eBay, they probably know more about the price elasticity of most goods than every good manufacturer out there.

One thing’s for sure, e-book sales and profitability are tied directly to the popularity of e-readers and tablets. And, based on current projections, it stands to be a bumper year. As evidence, Prime View International (PVI) chairman Scott Liu has said he expects global e-book reader shipments in 2010 will have a chance to surpass 10 million, since more than 50 new vendors are expected to launch e-book devices this year. Not only will eInk-based devices proliferate in number in 2010, but PVI will also be introducing a wide variety of new e-reader displays this year, including color, flexible, and touchscreen EPDs. The company also says that response times have been improved enough to allow for animation support on products in 2010.

Now, keep in mind that those projections about eInk devices in particular come from the company that owns the technology. Some analysts, however, predict that eInk may go the way of plasma screens.

The iPad has an LCD screen, LED-backlit for power efficiency, and while it doesn’t deliver the same sort of easy-on-the-eye viewing skills that e-ink’s electrophoretic technology does, what it will enable is the iPad to become a fully multimedia (books, music, video, Web) device that makes a Kindle’s tech look seriously outdated. Amazon’s already trying to combat Apple’s advances with the strangely-conceived Kindle app idea, and it’s clear that PVI is trying to indicate that when the Kindle 3 arrives (sometime in 2010?) it’ll have a improved screen tech that’ll go some way toward competing with the iPad’s offerings. We’re thinking about color e-ink’s implications for textbook-reading college students, among other things.

Over in the K12 education sector, some states are already considering or passing legislation that will open the way for consideration of digital textbooks as an alternative to the current print options. The latest state to pass a digital textbook bill is Georgia. Another growing trend is the adoption of Google Apps in school districts. Doug Johnson has this great post (and list) showing how adopting Google Apps can save schools money.

The common denominator for all of this is the evolution of technology in education, and there is a new report out on that very subject: “The Future of Higher Education: Beyond the Campus.” This is a joint JISC, SURF, EDUCAUSE, and CAUDIT report (i.e. international), and is organized under three broad headings: Drivers of Change, Enablers of the Future, and Emerging Themes. It also includes a six-page Underlying Technologies appendix covering: cloud computing, open educational resources, identity management, analytics, mobile devices, and collaboration tools.

Of course, the hardest part about technology in education is getting it deployed and used in the actual teaching process, i.e., in the classroom. On that very note, Lynn Schofield Clark’s Innovation in Mass Communications class at the University of Denver has produced this parody of “The Office” called “The Class.” I think the video speaks for itself.