Why Apple Won't Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon

Prior to forming my startup, I worked with an educational book publisher (low level books; K-8) for about 10 years. I continue to meet and consult with their marketing director/production manager on occasion, because I enjoy their business so much. I can tell you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the factors listed in this article will have little to do with whether Apple disrupts the textbook industry.

The purchasing process in education is unlike any other I've seen. The evaluative process is run by educators, not technology people. Many in the process really don't have any clue about what they're buying. They've already spent millions of dollars on very expensive "closed" systems. Further more, there aren't a lot of open systems even available. That's not the way education vendors work. Look at SMART (makers of the SMARTBoard). They have a lockdown end-to-end on everything from tools to content, they're crazy expensive, and completely proprietary.

Even with my experience selling to schools & libraries, I couldn't tell you if Apple will be successful disrupting the textbook industry. School buyers deal with a large number of stakeholders, and the decisions are made based on what's hot now. Apple has tremendous awareness, and there are certainly buyers for whom that will play a factor, but predicting success in the education market is far from easy.

" but if it really wants its textbook initiative to truly take off, it will have to develop apps for other platforms"

I don't think so... from some (very) preliminary experiments this morning, the .iBooks file is just a zip file containing a bunch of XHTML, XML, SVG, and JPG files (along with a few files I don't yet understand, but not many of those). There doesn't appear to be any encryption/DRM/other nastiness involved. If such is used, they must be applying it at the store level. I don't know whether this is pure ePub 3 or not, but in any case I doubt if it's going to be hard to convert these to other platforms or develop apps to run them directly.

If you want to have a look for yourself, use the command line zip rather than the Archive Utility that runs when you double-click the file in the finder. It gets confused for some reason.

I think his Point #1 & #4 are the main drawbacks. In the consumer market it's great to have a closed ecosystem where everything just works. But in a school environment cross platform is a must-have.

The irony is Apple's success with the iPad is the biggest reason for this. I anticipate a lot of people are going to buy the much cheaper Kindle Fire, find it isn't sufficient, and then bite the bullet and spring for an iPad. When they do I suspect a lot of them will donate the fire to their local school.

That's why schools have to be cross platform. Because you never know what is going to come in the door as a donation. If Samsung shows up wanting to give each student a free Galaxy Tab you don't want to turn them down.

Also, and this is a little off topic, but as someone who has tested these devices in a school I've found Apple's adherence to a single form factor to be a problem. The iPad is too big to be comfortably used for long periods of time by Elementary level kids. The 7" form factor works a lot better.