Lest you and I thought that Macmillan is going to be material only in demanding royalties from iPad and Kindle, the followers of education reform in Obama country have something more important than 123 million European subscribers to look forward to (That’s February’s Facebook score – 23% of Europe’s Pop) . Macmillan is also producing its own ebook software for laptops and iPhone which is already releasing special ebooks for school and college text from Atkins’ insights in Chemistry to standard Psychology texts in editions called Dynamic Books. these books can be rewritten by faculty for their class on the subject and would still be available at about 66% discount to their published price.
There is also a print on demand option for a higher price. For innovators like Amazon and Apple, this definitely makes things more complex than Adobe Air script or the style and looks game as offerings show greater customisation and increase consumer demands outside price and availability criteria.
Here’s the great investigative work from the NY times team working out kinks in Obama’s reform plans
via nytimesWhile many publishers have offered customized print textbooks for years — allowing instructors to reorder chapters or insert third-party content from other publications or their own writing — DynamicBooks gives instructors the power to alter individual sentences and paragraphs without consulting the original authors or publisher.
“Basically they will go online, log on to the authoring tool, have the content right there and make whatever changes they want,” said Brian Napack, president of Macmillan. “And we don’t even look at it.”
In August, Macmillan plans to start selling 100 titles through DynamicBooks, including “Chemical Principles: The Quest for Insight,” by Peter Atkins and Loretta Jones; “Discovering the Universe,” by Neil F. Comins and William J. Kaufmann; and “Psychology,” by Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert and Daniel M. Wegner. Mr. Napack said Macmillan was considering talking to other publishers to invite them to sell their books through DynamicBooks.
Students will be able to buy the e-books at dynamicbooks.com, in college bookstores and through CourseSmart, a joint venture among five textbook publishers that sells electronic textbooks. The DynamicBooks editions — which can be reached online or downloaded — can be read on laptops and the iPhone from Apple. Clancy Marshall, general manager of DynamicBooks, said the company planned to negotiate agreements with Apple so the electronic books could be read on the iPad.
The modifiable e-book editions will be much cheaper than traditional print textbooks. “Psychology,” for example, which has a list price of $134.29 (available on Barnes & Noble’s Web site for $122.73), will sell for $48.76 in the DynamicBooks version. Macmillan is also offering print-on-demand versions of the customized books, which will be priced closer to traditional textbooks.
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