The Xplanation

Textbook publishers are content curators. They began in a time when much of the knowledge for a single discipline could be contained in a single authoritative volume or small collection of volumes, in a time when definitive grammars, history books, and biological guides could exist. They performed a service — let the teachers teach and the professors research — and they created a business around that service. Naturally, the business model was founded on the concept of static print and based to a large extent on the notion of static information.

As the business of education grew in the 20th Century, the business opportunities for textbook publishers expanded as well. These opportunities led to increased competition and a proliferation of titles. The business model transitioned to one of choice within disciplines and shorter edition cycles that represented the broth paid expansion of information and the need to drive new revenue streams.

While the textbook publishing industry grew impressively from the 60s through the 90s, its overall position in the marketplace remained precarious. After all, not only do textbook publishers function as expert curators of learning content, they do so in a world full of experts who are simultaneously creating their own expert content. In other words, the fundamental commodity offered by textbook publishers is convenience. Historically, the educational market gave them exclusive license to curate our teaching content so that teachers could continue teaching and researchers could focus elsewhere.

The advent of the Web, as well as digital textbooks, has suddenly made the core service offered by textbook publishers less valuable. While most were content with the convenience publishers offered, and to pass along the costs of that convenience to students for decades, the market is now making dramatic shifts. Driven by concerns over education costs and growing more open to new alternatives for the curation of digital learning content, the general education market is seeing a fragmentation in the learning materials business.

Absent strategic change, major textbook publishers will see their position diminish significantly over the coming decade. In order to prevent such losses, textbook publishers will need to make important strategic changes.

I would suggest these six rules as the foundation for a new textbook publishing vision.

1. Expand your notion of content curation — Textbook publishers must move quickly beyond their traditional role of developing slick, proprietary versions of public-domain information. In order for their own content to maintain a value, publishers will need to begin offering updated curation services that include organizing and distributing open educational resources (OERs), developing supplemental materials for open content, and mapping the general Web to education-specific purposes. They need to learn from Amazon and Google, both of which have found ways to generate revenues from free books. They also need to learn from Yahoo and AOL who are reinventing themselves as content aggregators.

2. Disaggregate your content — One of the biggest obstacles faced by textbook publishers is the textbook itself, and the need to reinvent their vaults of content outside that traditional container. Just as music moved away from the album, textbook content is evolving beyond the traditional structure of the textbook and the chapter. Disaggregating their content means creating and storing content at more granular levels. It also means finding new distribution methodologies and e-commerce models.

3. Embrace media — A big key for textbook publishers is to look at their existence beyond print. The distribution and consumption of information is transitioning to other media formats and, in the future, textbook publishers will need to provide their information in new formats. This means changing editorial processes and workflows, but it also translates to new revenue streams. Put bluntly, publishers will lose the war of static print as it is and will be increasingly available for free all over the Web (and in attractive packaging).

4. Move aggressively into self-publishing — Again, learn from Amazon and others (like Lulu). They have grasped the business opportunities provided by making the means of production available to customers. They are creating partners out of their clients. They are also generating lifelong users. This is something textbook publishers must also do in order to remain variable and competitive in their unique market.

5. Focus increasingly on mobile — The future of learning content will be in distributed channels. I’m not limiting this to books or to the current mobile channels now available — e-readers, tablets, and smartphones. But, to be clear, successful textbook publishers will move immediately to revamp their current production and distribution workflows and develop clear business strategies centered on mobile and Web-only distribution.

6. Develop new business models and innovate — The time has come to stop ignoring fringe competitors based on historical experiences. YouTube was founded five years ago and is now the predominant video resource in the world. The same thing can and will happen in publishing. New models — Flatworld Knowledge, Orange Grove — should be taken seriously and studied carefully. In the coming ten years the landscape will change and new, currently unheard of, competitors will emerge and even dominate. In order to compete with this reality, textbook publishers need to become innovative in terms of their own business models. This may mean abandoning ISBNs or other business/product models in some instances. It will certainly mean re-architecting the traditional sales force model. Ultimately, the key is to be open to such change.

Additional Reading

Digital Textbook Sales in Higher Education — A Five-Year Projection (Rob Reynolds and Yevgeny Ioffe)

The Coming Digital Textbook Wave (Michael Feldstein)