If you thought that the release of iBooks two with digital support for textbooks wasn’t a big deal last week think again. According to Global Equities Research over the past 3 days Apple saw an astounding 350,000 digital textbooks downloaded. It looks like Apple is on it’s way to revolutionizing yet another way we receive information.
And if that wasn’t enough according to Trip Chowdhry, iBooks Author (Apple’s new tool that allows aspiring authors to create their own iBooks) was downloaded 90,000 times.
Based on Global Equities Research, the supply chain markup on textbooks ranges between 33 percent and 35 percent. So there are savings to be had in cutting out that publisher-to-distributor-to-wholesaler-to-retailer process. Add to this, the lower cost of iBook production, which the research outfit estimates to be 80 percent less than print publication – and a system under which textbooks are sold directly to students, who use them for a year, rather than to schools which keep the texts for an average of five years – and the math here starts to looks pretty good.
Cowdhry believes that, “this could be the recipe for Apple’s success in the textbook industry”.
What is your take on digital textbooks?