Macmillan announces DynamicBooks, allows instructors to edit digital textbooks

Publishing powerhouse Macmillan recently made headlines with its demands for pricing control on e-books sold through Amazon. To recap: Amazon at first dropped Macmillan’s books from its store (including print editions) because the publisher wanted to charge more than $9.99 for Amazon e-books. Amazon later begrudgingly accepted Macmillan’s demands, and moved towards an agency model which allowed the publisher to set its own e-book pricing (between $12.99 to $15.99).

Now the publisher is making news with e-books once again — this time with its own software platform, DynamicBooks. The software allows instructors to take advantage of the impermanent nature of digital textbooks by letting them edit the contents of an e-book without approval from the original publisher or author. Professors can add and delete text, rearrange chapters, and include media of their own in the e-books by simply logging into an online authoring tool.

Macmillan plans to sell the e-books via dynamicbooks.com, CourseSmart (a joint project by several textbook publishers), and college book stores. The DynamicBooks editions can be downloaded or viewed online, and read on computers and the iPhone. The e-books will also be significantly cheaper than print editions. The NYT points to the textbook “Psychology”, which lists for $134.29, and sells for $119.20 on Barnes and Noble’s website; the DynamicBooks version of the textbook will sell for just $48.76.

The company is negotiating an iPad agreement with Apple, and I would expect Android support in the near future as well. Macmillan plans to launch the service in August with 100 available titles.

DynamicBooks looks like it could be a boon to college instructors who are particularly picky about the material their courses cover, and students will surely appreciate the lower cost.

More so than just remixing individual textbooks, an editable e-book platform like this could allow professors to combine material across multiple textbooks and academic sources. It could finally bring an end to the dreaded course packet — which for the longest time has either involved photocopying pages of multiple textbooks, or keeping track of multiple PDFs. If Macmillan is smart, it’s likely already looking into these further remixing opportunities.

[Screenshot via The New York Times]

Tags: DynamicBooks, e-books, textbooks

Companies: amazon, Macmillan

Written by Devindra Hardawar on February 22nd, 2010 with no comments.
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Amazon’s stronghold on e-book pricing crumbles, will renegotiate with Macmillan and HarperCollins

Days after Macmillan books disappeared from Amazon’s inventory due to a feud over pricing, Amazon has confirmed that it has caved to Macmillan’s demands and will be raising the prices of Macmillan e-books from $9.99 to $12.99-$14.99 for hardcover and bestselling editions. The online retail giant expressed its strong disagreement with this pricing but decided to still offer the books to customers who can decide with their wallets whether they want to purchase Macmillan e-books at at what it calls “needlessly high prices”. A domino effect is beginning to be seen with News Corp-owned HarperCollins now jumping on the “We want higher pricing” bandwagon. In its earning conference call on Tuesday, News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch clearly and concisely summarized the situation by stating:

We don’t like the Amazon model of selling everything at $9.99. They don’t pay us that. They pay us the full wholesale price of $14 or whatever we charge. We think it really devalues books and it hurts all the retailers of the hard cover books. We are not against [inaudible] books. On the contrary we like them very much indeed. It is low cost to us and so on. But we want some room to maneuver in it. Amazon, sorry Apple in its agreement with us which has not been disclosed in detail does allow for a variety of slightly higher prices. There will be prices very much less than the printed copies of books but still will not be fixed in a way that Amazon has been doing it. It appears that Amazon is now ready to sit down with us again and renegotiate pricing.

With the single decision to capitulate to Macmillan, Amazon has opened the floodgates on higher e-book pricing and we can expect that other major book publishers will seek similar increases. Any Kindle owners out there care to chime in on these price increases and the potential effect on your book buying habits?

Read (Macmillan)

Read (HarperCollins)

Written by Kelly Hodgkins on February 3rd, 2010 with no comments.
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