In 1994, I was hired as a consultant to Harcourt Brace College Publishers in Texas, due to my background in interactive videodisc, authoring tools and multimedia and their high degree of need to stem the downward trend of falling college textbook sales.

They were searching for ways to add value to new textbooks in order to incent faculty to specify the latest version and create a disincentive in the used book market. I was instrumental in assisting them to create an interactive CD-ROM (and saved them several hundred thousand dollars in development costs over what they thought needed to be invested!) so that the disc could be affixed to the back of the book and contain so much additional material that faculty and students would be hardpressed to ignore the newest book.

Didn’t really work, though the practice of bundling has become widespread in the college publishing marketplace. Book sale increases at Harcourt were modest at best, and the CEO and head of New Media both left within a couple of years after that (to the now defunct UOL Publishing, an online university concept). I’ve not kept appraised of this space, but my daughter buying textbooks for this coming Fall has brought this issue to the forefront once again.

Bear with me for a moment as I connect some dots surrounding the textbook space, Amazon’s Kindle, the rumored Apple Tablet, the shifts in Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) and the category known as rich, internet applications, and how I am certain we’re very, very close to the tipping point for textbooks being delivered electronically.

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