The Next Blockbuster Story Lies in the Textbook Industry

The analogy is a little off since Blockbuster and Netflix for the most part just distributed the content instead of producing it. In the movie industry the cost to produce the movie is shouldered by the studios and paid for by theater runs, and by the time it reached Blockbuster most of the profits had been made.

Textbook publishers create the content and keep it up to date year after year, so while there are indeed opportunities for price reduction in the delivery, they still have the same expense to produce the content in the first place. There is no textbook industry equivalent of a theater run to pay for content creation, unless you could roll that price into college tuition or MOOC course fees and then later offer the books through discounted subscription or rental services.