enhanced e-textbooks?

In academic publishing, textbooks are a major income stream. For this reason, adapting to the changing needs of students opens up a large debate in the industry.

Heavy textbooks can be a burden on students, and often the print costs can become quite expensive for larger volumes. However, while e-textbooks appear to be very progressive in terms of publishing digital strategy, the media elements (such as video and music) can age faster than the plain text, which means that the e-textbooks would perhaps need to be replaced and re-edited more often, leading to higher costs.

For these reasons, the importance of qualitative and quantitative market research was discussed. Accessing the views of the public is invaluable, and we split into groups of 4-5 people in order to test the validity and marketability of enhanced e-textbooks. We used the platform surveymonkey (which is fast becoming an extremely useful tool on the course) and we posted the survey on social media.

UPDATE: our survey had a lot of replies (over 40) and surmised that enhanced e-textbooks should meet somewhere in the middle. Students and teachers were not overly keen on a lot of flashy media elements, but would consider purchasing the eBook if it was to be cheaper and more practical. Price was a primary driving factor, and it appeared that £25 for a very good edition was the absolute limit. This is possibly due to the idea of value, as holding a physical book that one has paid a chunk of money for appears to be much more worthwhile than downloading an app and losing £40 from your bank account.