Academic and science, technical and medical (STM) publishers predict that the internet will dominate university text book delivery in the near future, but the book is not dead. Speaking at the Publishers Association International Division conference delegates from Macmillan and Wiley agreed on the increasingly important role the internet will play for text books.
"The text book is transferring to online provision," said Dominic Knight, Palgrave Macmillan managing director in an interview with IWR. At the conference Knight described the text book market as "on the verge of radical change because of the growth of the internet".
Jamie Marshall, associate publishing director at Palgrave Macmillan , the academic publishing company, said: "all educational material will be available online, and a lot of core material such as big textbook packages will be available only in an online form".
Knight was keen to defend the traditional text book though, "It is not dead. Text books and online material could be bought [in a] range of different packages in the future."
Marshall said it was highly likely that the e-book would emerge as a viable, inexpensive technology..., and pay-as-you-go content would develop. "With virtual learning environments being developed the universities are looking for material to be delivered in chapter sized chunks," Knight said of the changing information environment developing in universities.
"There is increasingly a demand from students for 'slabs' of information - they are willing to pay - but only for that one bit of information," Marshall said.
A challenge facing publishers and information professionals is the changing perception of information value. " Wikipedia for example may well become 'good enough' for students and that is a challenge we will have to look at closely," Knight said, adding" Students might well say that something which is free and does 80% of the job is OK, so they don't want to pay for 100%."
Comment. If students and faculty are willing to shift from print textbooks to online textbooks, then they will have removed the largest obstacle now holding down OA textbooks. Given two online textbooks of roughly equal quality, students and faculty will vastly prefer the OA book to the book shackled with copy restrictions, print restrictions, infrequent corrections, tethered to a single machine, and bound to expire, even apart from the price. Quality will always matter, but there will always be high-quality books on both sides of the price barrier.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/22/2005 09:22:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
