Ingram Buys CourseSmart, As Two Largest eTextbook Players Unite, Point The Way To A Post-Textbook Future

Over the past few years, change has come to the textbook market in a big way. Chegg, one of the first companies to bring textbook purchasing and rentals online and reach a sizable audience, has begun to re-position. Affordable, “open” digital textbook pioneer, Flat World Knowledge, is moving “beyond” the publishing business, too. Pearson has been seeing lower demand for its textbooks and has been pouring money into going digital — the list goes on.

The market’s shift to digital has continued to accelerate, and if the latest news from the Textbook Frontier is any indication, we may even be hurdling headlong into a “post-textbook” future. Last week, in a deal that “unites the two largest players” in the digital textbook market, according to Publisher’s Weekly, Ingram Content Group announced that it would be acquiring CourseSmart for an undisclosed price.

Ingram’s Vital Source eTextbook platform has over four million faculty and student users and offers content from over 500 academic publishers, while CourseSmart has 1.5 million faculty users and boasts that it offers more than 90 percent of the textbook titles in higher education at 60 percent the cost of print. Combined, the two companies will become the largest provider of eTextbooks in higher education.

However, in spite of the promise of digital textbooks, it’s worth pointing out that, according to Inside Higher Ed, the two companies combined will have less than 200 employees, and you likely haven’t heard of either company. It almost seems as if the biggest player in eTextbooks is still a fairly small, niche player.

So, why does this acquisition matter?

For starters, when it was founded in 2007, CourseSmart marked a first for the textbook industry. The company is a product of a consortium of the five largest academic publishers — Cengage, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons and Pearson — which intended to form a united front through which the companies could team together to distribute eTextbooks. In spite of its collectively covering 90 percent of textbook titles and partnerships with an additional 50 publishers, CourseSmart never quite took off.

So, from one vantage point, the sale of CourseSmart may be yet another indication that the major academic publishers are backing away from the eTextbook market altogether, putting their energy and resources behind other digital tools and products. With the entry of tech industry giants like Apple, Amazon and Google into the digital textbook market, and with open educational resources gaining ground, the major textbook publishers are retreating.

It could also be a good sign for startups like Boundless, which was sued by three of the CourseSmart publishers in 2012 and finally settled late last year. The top publishers had been pushing back on “open” textbook platforms, claiming copyright infringement in many cases. But, as Boundless CEO Ariel Diaz told Inside Higher Ed, Ingram’s acquisition of CourseSmart could signal an important step away from the way we have traditionally conceived of textbooks — as the print or digitized “container” for academic materials — into something totally different.

This “post-textbook” world could be defined less by the conception of “textbooks” and more by modular, cross-platform digital resources that are “more modular, personalized and open,” Diaz told Inside Higher Ed.

While publishers and digital distributors have struggled to eek out a living, there could be big opportunity (and big dollars) for the company or companies that own the mindshare when it comes to the next generation of these modular, personalized, “post” textbooks.

View the original article here

Ingram Buys CourseSmart, As Two Largest eTextbook Players Unite, Point The Way To A Post-Textbook Future

Over the past few years, change has come to the textbook market in a big way. Chegg, one of the first companies to bring textbook purchasing and rentals online and reach a sizable audience, has begun to re-position. Affordable, “open” digital textbook pioneer, Flat World Knowledge, is moving “beyond” the publishing business, too. Pearson has been seeing lower demand for its textbooks and has been pouring money into going digital — the list goes on.

The market’s shift to digital has continued to accelerate, and if the latest news from the Textbook Frontier is any indication, we may even be hurdling headlong into a “post-textbook” future. Last week, in a deal that “unites the two largest players” in the digital textbook market, according to Publisher’s Weekly, Ingram Content Group announced that it would be acquiring CourseSmart for an undisclosed price.

Ingram’s Vital Source eTextbook platform has over four million faculty and student users and offers content from over 500 academic publishers, while CourseSmart has 1.5 million faculty users and boasts that it offers more than 90 percent of the textbook titles in higher education at 60 percent the cost of print. Combined, the two companies will become the largest provider of eTextbooks in higher education.

However, in spite of the promise of digital textbooks, it’s worth pointing out that, according to Inside Higher Ed, the two companies combined will have less than 200 employees, and you likely haven’t heard of either company. It almost seems as if the biggest player in eTextbooks is still a fairly small, niche player.

So, why does this acquisition matter?

For starters, when it was founded in 2007, CourseSmart marked a first for the textbook industry. The company is a product of a consortium of the five largest academic publishers — Cengage, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons and Pearson — which intended to form a united front through which the companies could team together to distribute eTextbooks. In spite of its collectively covering 90 percent of textbook titles and partnerships with an additional 50 publishers, CourseSmart never quite took off.

So, from one vantage point, the sale of CourseSmart may be yet another indication that the major academic publishers are backing away from the eTextbook market altogether, putting their energy and resources behind other digital tools and products. With the entry of tech industry giants like Apple, Amazon and Google into the digital textbook market, and with open educational resources gaining ground, the major textbook publishers are retreating.

It could also be a good sign for startups like Boundless, which was sued by three of the CourseSmart publishers in 2012 and finally settled late last year. The top publishers had been pushing back on “open” textbook platforms, claiming copyright infringement in many cases. But, as Boundless CEO Ariel Diaz told Inside Higher Ed, Ingram’s acquisition of CourseSmart could signal an important step away from the way we have traditionally conceived of textbooks — as the print or digitized “container” for academic materials — into something totally different.

This “post-textbook” world could be defined less by the conception of “textbooks” and more by modular, cross-platform digital resources that are “more modular, personalized and open,” Diaz told Inside Higher Ed.

While publishers and digital distributors have struggled to eek out a living, there could be big opportunity (and big dollars) for the company or companies that own the mindshare when it comes to the next generation of these modular, personalized, “post” textbooks.

View the original article here

Tipping Point: U.S. Mobile Data Revenues Outweighed Those Of Voice In 2013, On Track For $100B/Year

Tipping Point: U.S. Mobile Data Revenues Outweighed Those Of Voice In 2013, On Track For $100B/Year | TechCrunch #site-logo { background: url(http://s1.wp.com/wp-content/themes/vip/techcrunch-2013/images/logos/green.png) no-repeat !important; }if (!ads.isMobile()) {(function(window,$){window.TechCrunch.loader.on('tc_ads_wrapper_omniture', function(){if ( !window.ads.isAdPageSet ){if ( typeof window.adSetAdURL == 'function' ) {window.adSetAdURL('/wp-content/themes/vip/techcrunch-2013/_uac/adpage.html');window.ads.isAdPageSet = true;}}window.htmlAdWH('93311108', "LB", "LB", 'f', 'adsDiv412b6a6234');});}(this,this.jQuery));}Got a tip? Let us know.MenuSearchNewsChannelsStartupsMobileGadgetsEnterpriseSocialEuropeAsiaCrunchGovTrendingYahooAppleFacebookTwitterGoogleMicrosoftNSATCTVShowsTCTV NewsAsk A VCCrunchWeekFly Or DieFoundationFounder StoriesTechCrunch GadgetsGillmor GangKeen OnTC CribsTechCrunch MakersAll ShowsAll VideosEventsTechCrunch EventsDisruptCrunchiesMeetupsInternational City EventsHackathonHardware BattlefieldNews AboutSXSWCESE3All EventsSearch TechCrunchSearch TechCrunchCrunchBaseFollow UsFacebookTwitterGoogle+LinkedInYoutubeRSSEmailMoreLinkedInYoutubeRSSEmail

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China may be the biggest of all when it comes to the sheer volume of users in its mobile market — 700 smartphone and tablet users, and counting — but when it comes to revenues from the new wave of data services beyond legacy voice calls, it’s the U.S. that continues to lead. New research out today from Chetan Sharma notes that collectively mobile data revenues in the U.S. market were $90 billion for 2013, and that this year it will become the first country to pass $100 billion annually.

Overall, carriers and others made more from mobile data service revenues than voice for the first time this year. The U.S. is not the first country to do this, however: it’s actually seventh, Sharma says — Japan was first, in 2011. Nevertheless, growth in mobile data revenues is still not outstripping the decline of voice revenues: overall, ARPU declined by $0.39, with voice ARPU down by $1.51 while the average data ARPU up by $1.13. Each is hovering now around the $27/user mark.

In 2013, smartphone penetration reached 66% and 92% of all mobile handsets sold are smartphones. But when looking at all connected devices sold, tablets accounted for 49% of the volume.

Sharma also said that Apple “bounced back” against Android and took a 49% share of smartphones sold in Q4. But this is a relatively small bounce we’re talking about: over the whole year, the two dominant players were nearly level at about 48% each of all smartphone sales, with “crumbs” for the remainder of the field.

Not a pretty picture for the fate of BlackBerry, or Windows Phone/Nokia making any more headway than they have in years past — or any other would-be new entrant for that matter. “While it is fairly clear that Windows will acquire the #3 spot behind iOS and Android, the journey to a substantial and competitive market share is still ways off,” Sharma writes. It’s also not quite in line with figures from other analysts, so triangulate as you will.

Sharma bases a lot of his research around revenues reported by carriers, although he also incorporates data from tech companies that are making huge bets on mobile in the form of apps and resulting advertising and payments revenues. The number companies making more than $100 million per quarter on mobile continues to grow, evidenced by the likes of Facebook (53% of its revenues last quarter) and Twitter (75% of its advertising revenues), but also the thousands of app developers out there. Remember, Flappy Bird was pulling in more than $50,000 per day at its peak.

Some more interesting data points from Sharma’s report:

The U.S. mobile data service were up 20%  to $24.8B in Q4 2013 compared to the year before. The majority of new mobile subscriptions came from “non-phone devices.” Verizon led with 36% share followed by T-Mobile at 34%. Overall US carriers added 12M+ new subscriptions in 2013.Sharma notes that the U.S. now accounts for 22% of the world’s mobile data revenues, with China and Japan are following behind. Working out the math, that gives us a worldwide mobile data revenue figure of $409 billion.He also notes the impact that T-Mobile has had on the U.S. industry with its “Un-carrier” marketing push with new pricing plans that give much more flexibility to users and untie them from longer contracts and with different terms for devices. “More of that will happen in 2014 as consumers start to do the math of decoupling the device cost with the services expense,” he predicts.Still, it was Verizon and AT&T that led the pack in the last quarter, where they accounted for 68% of all mobile data services revenue and took 67% of the total subscription base. These figures contributed to the pair respectively holding on to number two and three positions for mobile data revenue globally.Sharma notes that 24% of the patents granted by the USPTO in 2013 were mobile related, with the usual suspects — Samsung, IBM, Microsoft, Sony, and Ericsson — accounting for the top 5.

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