Ebooks in Australian educational publishing

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The textbook market for ebook products has been slower to catch on than that of trade. However, educational publishers have actively developed ebook products for students and educators over the last few years, especially in the US, using partners such as Vital Source.

Vital Source has partnered up with many of the world's leading educational publishers and is fast becoming a major player in the ebook texbook market. Some of the main educational publishers on board include:

• Elsevier
• John Wiley & Sons
• McGraw-Hill
• Pearson Education Group
• Oxford University Press
• Blackwell Publishing
  

The principal educational publishers in Australia have also dipped their toes into ebook manufacture and are commonly using the VitalBook^TM format. For example, the first edition of McGraw-Hill's Advertising and Promotion, published in 2008, has an integrated ebook with the textbook that allows note-taking, search and highlighting abilities. Similarly, Wiley's second edition of Organisational Behaviour, published a couple of months ago, comes with a Vital Source ebook to assist the student's study.

However, when you look at Australia's leading educational publishers' websites it is not clear what types or even which ebooks are available. A simple search doesn't bring much up - indeed, I only know where to look because these books are my publishing house's competition.

Leaving this unusual non-promotion aside, it seems that the ebook market in Australia is largely unchartered and in its early stages of growth. Compared to the US (and even there it is a budding rather than thriving industry) Australia only started developing educational ebooks over the last three or so years.

On the whole, the trend seems to be in educational publishing to have an ebook as a standalone saleable item and then bundle it with a printed product after its first year. This is hardly an encouraging set of circumstances for the educational ebook - the need to bundle ebooks shows that there is not too much demand for them. 

But perhaps this is because there's a climate of uncertainty on how best to incorporate ebooks in education. Everyone seems very eager - publisher and consumer - but textbook (hardcopy) sales are not dropping.

Educational ebooks are in an interesting place at the moment, there is demand but noone has really worked out how best to sell or use them. In terms of using them, for example, do they need to be online, downloadable or available through ebook readers? And with regards to selling them, should they be packaged with the textbook, sold as a standalone ebook (as a percentage of the printed price which is cheaper but doesn't allow the student to keep the ebook once it expires), or as individual ebook chapters?

My company feels that ebook chapters will be the way of the future - students can buy the chapters they need to save money. But the way educational ebook demand will go is not clear yet.

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