In Defense of Publishers and Digital

Brian Kibby, president of McGraw-Hill Education, threw down the gauntlet in a recent essay for Inside Higher Education, asserting that there needs to be a complete shift to digital in higher education, and it needs to be done within the next 36 months. He claims lagging grades and student graduation rates, along with graduates not leaving schools with the skills employers need, as the reasons the digital shift is so important.

The problem with this challenge is those paying for the course materials aren’t buying it, according to Daniel Luzer, web editor of the Washington Monthly.

“That’s because students don’t actually like the digital model,” Luzer wrote. “While electronic might work well enough for some forms of reading: novels (particularly the trash sort where you don’t want people to see what you’re reading on the subway or whatever) and magazine articles, it’s not actually all that good for studying, where underlining and marking up the text is part of what enables people to learn. It’s just hard to study using anything other than print.”

He then suggests the possibility of an ulterior motive to Kibby’s challenge.

“What students really want are used or rental textbooks,” Luzer said. “Textbook rentals are very popular on college campuses. But then, McGraw-Hill doesn’t make any money off textbook rentals or used books.”

Making publishers out to be the bad guys may be good reading on a blog, but Luzer seems to fail to understand where digital course materials and education are headed, which is part of Kibby's point. Digital course materials of the future will be not be the “PDF-equivalent” that they are today, and it will not be about “reading” text like we may have in the pre- and early-digital dark ages.

While Kibby’s forecast may be aggressively optimistic, the future of course materials will be more digital, and more value-adding in terms of contributing to student success. What will replace textbooks are products that are interactive, incorporate assessments, and which are tied to improving learning outcomes. Most major publishers, like McGraw, are making substantive investments in higher education gaming solutions, assessment of content mastery, re-envisioned LMS and learning environments, adaptive learning materials, and a range of other digital products that we would hardly recognize as “textbooks.”

Regarding the ulterior motive ascribed to Kibby’s challenge, publishers like McGraw are publicly traded commercial enterprises, and thus have a distinct incentive to maximize financial returns. If current business practices (e.g., used and rental) do not allow them to generate revenue off of products they originally created, then we should expect they will explore and promote products and business models that do.

What students want is value at a reasonable price. That does not necessarily mean “used or rental” textbooks. They are just the perceived best option at the current time.

Our mission should be to improve educational affordability and student success. We should learn to stop bashing the publishers like an autoimmune response to change.

Do I like every publisher business practice?  No.  Are course material prices too high (generally speaking)?  Yes.  Are arguments like this productive or lead to better solutions?  Not likely.

We would be much better served by finding ways to be part of the new technologies and delivery models, and helping find ways to improve them, rather than giving the long-term suppliers and partners for our core product reasons to work against and around us. Let us take some accountability and help create options that address both affordability and student success, recognizing that many of these options will be substantively digital in the possibly not-to-distant future.

Publishers' Maneuvers Signal Need for Change

It’s no secret many colleges and universities are struggling to meet their budgets due to funding cuts and stagnant endowments. Many students, too, are having trouble covering tuition. But academic publishers are feeling the pinch as well, even as schools gear up for the fall term—the course-materials equivalent of the holiday shopping season.

Recent financial moves by two of the biggest college textbook publishers reveal signs of stress, which could redefine relationships with campus bookstores.

Last September, McGraw-Hill said it would spin off its educational publishing from its more profitable financial data publishing, creating two companies. However, the Wall Street Journal reported July 13 that a private equity firm is sniffing around the educational unit and may put in a bid to buy it.

In a separate report by Bloomberg News, Cengage Learning, grappling with debt from its own acquisition five years ago, may be considering an initial public offering to bring in cash.

“The academic publishers are under threat, and campus stores should not assume that they are immune or unaffected by that or similar factors. We should not look at challenging times among the publishers as a good thing,” says Mark Nelson, NACS chief information officer and vice president of NACS Media Solutions.

For independent and institutional campus stores, the situation doesn’t bode well. These stores are already a difficult (read: costly) channel for textbook publishers because each store must be dealt with on an individual basis. Systems vary from store to store, and some stores, astonishingly in this era, still don’t have full inventory management or e-commerce capabilities. Some tussle mightily with publishers who are trying to move into digital course materials.

“The more stores fight against publishers, the more publishers will be pushed to look at alternative channels they can potentially trust, such as direct-to-student,” Nelson says. “If they are working around campus stores as a channel, did anyone ever give thought to the possibility that it is because stores aren’t adding value to them as a channel as they once did?”

Yet the key to survival for both academic publishers and campus stores may lie in stronger partnerships. “The publishers need campus stores, and we need them if we are going to make it through the digital transition ahead,” Nelson says.

“Within NACS, we are developing or considering several mechanisms to improve publisher relations and industry relevance,” Nelson says. “We’re looking at communications that help publishers understand what we’re doing, both as an association and an industry. We’re looking to create a publisher advisory board to provide us with input into how to develop better programs and services, and create a stronger communication channel between stores and publishers.

“Logistically, this may be executed later this year through The Hub, the new online collaboration and knowledge management environment NACS is preparing to unveil at CAMEX 2013,” he adds. “NACS alone cannot solve these problems, however, if stores and publishers are unwilling to change their perspectives. If we fail to do so, we may all fail to transition.”