[elearning] Publishers and ebook offerings in 2014

[Philip Callil]

Hi All,

I thought the following will be of interest to you…..

On Friday,one of the well known publishers visited Yarra Valley Grammar to give a demo on a ESL language ebook being offered for next year. It was quite impressive – but what wasn't impressive was the price being charged.  At a time when the cost of books should be going down – significantly down given the savings in printing and distribution – ebooks have been put into a business model that is profitable for publishers and terrible for schools and parents.

It may or may not come as a surprise to you that Australians have always paid significantly more for books than consumers (and families) in North America, Asia and Europe.  This is just fact. This is effectively an increase in the cost of learning for us here in Australia that we have paid for decades – long before online purchases. Time does not permit an exploration of the reason for this additional cost.

Back to last Friday's meeting.  The cost of the ebook was $55.  The cost of the teacher resource that includes keeping all student marks on the publisher's server and allowing access to our students' marks was scheduled to be $150.  So – we pay $55 x 150 students and we are expected to pay another $600 for teachers to access student marks??

I think this is outrageous.  But it is not just this particular publisher.  All publishers are doing this.  At a time when prices should be going down, school book prices have been going up.  Publishers have "added" flat pdfs of their books and advertised that these are "interactive".  A flat pdf is just not interactive.  The result have been 10-15% increases for both print and pdfs of their books.

To market an ebook at $55 when that book could easily be marketed at $35 and still allow for publisher profit really should be seen for what it is. Publishers are just picking off schools one by one doing this.  As soon as protest was made about the $150 cost of teachers accessing student marks, there was a quick backdown and a promise to "review" or "negotiate" this.

My advice is really question your school book suppliers and publishers.  If we don't, schools will continue to condone and support profits for large publishing companies (most if many are multi national corporate) at the expense of families that attend your school.  Prices for iPad and laptop versions of school books should have gone down and should be going down significantly.  I am all for profit for publishers – they are needed - but not when the prices being charged to school families give the impression of price gouging.

Best wishes

Philip Callil
Director of IT and eLearning
Yarra Valley Grammar
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.edulists.com.au/pipermail/elearning/attachments/20130817/68d66092/attachment.html