Three Types of Digital Textbooks in the Educational Publishing Future [VIDEO]

As I look at the horizon and think about the evolutions of e-textbooks over the past ten years, it seems to me that we’re likely to see the development of three strong categories of e-textbooks over the next 2-3 years. Each of these can be viewed both in terms of cost and functionality.

Medium-cost publisher XML e-books with some resource enhancements — The digital products will be based on pre-existing print textbooks and will feature some resource enhancement via linking. Thee will be the primary e-textbook offered from publishers and will be the format distributed within LMS platforms.
Low cost and free, flexible XML e-textbooks and resource collections – These will come from digital-first publishers and will feature everything from traditional authorship models to crowdsourced authoring. The cost of these products will be disruptive in comparison to traditional publisher e-textbooks as these groups do not have a pre-existing print model to support. Most of these models will focus on broad social interactivity among users as opposed to expensive media layering and assessment markup.
High-end, interactive XML e-books with significant, customized interactivity — At the other end of the spectrum will be traditional publisher products that are customized in a significant manner to offer high levels of interactivity and assessment.

A couple of other quick thoughts about these three models. First, numbers 1 and 2 will resemble textbooks less and less over time. Second, we are seeing the end of the era for PDF ad Flash in e-textbooks. And finally, expect to see more and more design focused on tablets and smartphones as opposed to notebooks and netbooks.

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