Via this article in the WSJ, a great look at the buggy whip industry trying to hold back the tide of technology. In this case, the buggy whip industry is played by the textbook industry, which has not yet figured out that high profits and captive audiences are a thing of the past, and is desperately trying to hold on. As the article notes:
Custom textbooks like this one are proliferating on U.S. college campuses, guaranteeing hefty sales for publishers -- and payments to colleges that are generally undisclosed to students. The publisher of the Alabama book -- Bedford/St. Martin's, based in Boston -- pays the Tuscaloosa school's English department a $3 royalty on each of the 4,000 copies sold each year. And though the prohibition on selling the book used can't be legally enforced, the college bookstore won't buy the books back, making it more difficult for students to find used copies.
This "customization" is being driven in an attempt to slow down the decline in business, which has accelerated through...technology, of course.
For publishers, the custom market is a way to thwart used-book sales, which cut deeply into their profits. Though used books have been around for decades, they have become a much bigger industry threat in the Internet age. Web sites for used books, such as Amazon.com and eBay, have transformed fragmented, campus-by-campus dealings in old texts into a national market, where discounts of 50% off the new-book price are common. Because of their limited audience, custom books are difficult to resell -- and they sometimes aren't eligible for authorized campus book-buyback programs.
And what is really coming, of course, are true eBooks and eBooks readers. Look at the student costs for textbooks -- an average of $900 per student per year, then look at the cost of the Kindle and what it would take to fill it up. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the only big obstacle to having this rapidly transform the education market is the desperate clutch for the old profit margins.
The interesting piece here is what will happen as books read on a device take hold on campus -- the devices become the way that students primarily digest information for school, fueling even further the shift to digital we're seeing in the overall media environment.