Are Tablets the New Blackboards?

As tablet computers and e-readers become more commonplace, they may become as essential to classrooms as the blackboard, and textbook publishers are increasing their digital offerings accordingly and looking for partners to help out.

Next year, e-textbook sales are expected to more than double to $308 million from about $138 million this year, found social-learning company MBS Service Co.'s Xplana, which predicts that by 2014, the U.S. digital textbook market will surpass 18 percent of new textbook sales for the higher education and career education markets combined.

The e-textbook revolution in schools may create opportunities for entrepreneurs with ideas on how to make textbook material more interactive. One of the key obstacles that schools are confronting is that they’re isn’t enough interactive content out there, but another is that digitized versions of textbooks tend to be straight conversions that do not fully utilize the tablet’s interactive features, the Wall Street Journal reports today.

Higher-education textbook publisher McGraw-Hill Co. just signed a deal with interactive textbook start-up Inkling to make more of its titles available through Inkling's app for Apple's iPad tablet, the Journal says. Pearson PLC said it is also in advanced discussions with Inkling to offer a portion of its titles through the same app.

Over the next year, McGraw-Hill said it plans to have its top 100 undergraduate titles and its medical-school curriculum converted to a digital form, complete with interactive features that will add new dimensions to the textbook material. That initial effort will be just phase one of a larger plan to create more engaging learning experiences through tablets.

While it is expected that the books can be accessed via tablets like the iPad, or one of the new rival tablets coming out, such as the Motorola Xoom, e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook are also in line as beneficiaries of the e-textbook trend. Last year, Barnes & Noble released a free downloadable application called NOOKstudy to college campuses that allows students to read and study their e-textbooks on their Macs and PCs.

In fact, at Stony Brook University in Long Island, New York, for instance, students entering the university bookstore are immediately confronted with signs that say: “Your Choice: New, Used, Rental, E-textbooks. ” The e-textbook titles available in the university bookstore rose from 112 in Fall 2009 to 430 in Fall 2010, as a growing number of students use tablets and e-readers rather than carrying around books.

One reason: price. Students reported that they were saving as much as 40 percent on textbook costs by purchasing digital books—and it makes for a lighter load to carry around campus too.

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