by Goldie Blumenstyk
Pearson Education announced recently that it would create digital versions of about 100 of its top-selling college textbooks for the fall of 2001.
Pearson’s push into digital textbooks is significant both for its size and its limits. By pledging to create 100 e-textbooks, Pearson, the world’s leading education publisher, would be adding significantly to the overall availability of such texts on the market. Jim Behnke, senior vice president and director of Pearson Education’s central media group, estimates that such electronic books now number in the hundreds.
The books, to be developed by the MetaText division of Colorado-based NetLibrary, will include features allowing users to electronically highlight passages, annotate sections in margin notes, and attach links to Web sites. But at the same time, the company has decided not to spend money on extensive enhancements to the content. For example, while the MetaText platform would allow a digital animation of a chemistry experiment, Pearson won’t be incorporating such features into its textbooks.
Behnke said the company was still wary of investing too heavily in an untested product line. “There’s not tremendous evidence that sales are taking off,” he said. McGraw-Hill, which began selling digital versions of 20 of its college textbooks this spring — in collaboration with a New York company called WizeUp Digital Textbooks — is expected to announce a further foray into the field shortly. Pearson said it would integrate the digital textbooks into the private-label, online course-management system that it has developed with the course-management company Blackboard.
MetaText also has the rights to sell the textbooks to users who do not use the Blackboard product. Behnke said he expected that those digital textbooks would be less expensive than their hard-copy counterparts. He also said most of the books to be converted would be those for courses in the humanities, social sciences, and business.