Page 14 - Campus Technology, July 2017

E-TEXTBOOKS
In that same year, McGraw-Hill announced that sales of its digital products exceeded its print products. Cengage reported the same. Pearson was more secretive, telling Inside Higher Ed that its “digital and services revenues rose to 65 percent” across its worldwide operations, up from 47 percent in 2010. While the same article questioned the truth of those sales, suggesting that much of the sales could be bundles incorporating print items too, the overall message was that publishers had repositioned themselves as digital businesses.
Just in time. Even as the death knell was sounding for print, Indiana U has seen nothing but growth for its IU eTexts digital initiative:
In the fiscal year 2017, 40,734 students had at least one digital textbook, and the number of students in the fall and spring semesters totaled 53,622.
During FY17 alone the gross student savings (list price minus what students paid) exceeded $7 million; cumulative savings have reached $10 million.
Student spending on e-texts has grown 50 percent year over year for the past two years. The amount of revenue passed through to content providers will top $6 million solely in FY17.
Students and faculty are also embracing the unique capabilities of digital content. During one month alone this spring — March — Wheeler said that 100,000 annotations and notes were added by students and faculty through Unizin Engage, the e-reading platform in use by the university.
With each passing year, there’s growth in the number of faculty authors who have written books and assembled their own course packs of collected readings.
Perhaps most tellingly, 25 publishers representing 88,000 titles and adaptive educational exercises have joined the IU eText program.
Across the institution, a total of 2,588 course sections for 1,112 courses have adopted e-texts. But even with that growth, Wheeler said the transition to digital is “still at the very early edge, relative to all course sections across
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