Ask anyone who attended college what their largest expense was after tuition and they are most likely to tell you, aside from adult beverages, that textbook purchases burned the largest hole in their wallet.There are signs, however, that the time-honored tradition of purchasing seemingly hundreds of pounds of paper at the beginning of the semester may be changing.This past July, the Book Industry Study Group released a survey of 4,000 librarians, publishers, and retailers and found that 80% of the respondents believe that the textbook industry will inevitably move to a subscription model.As digital readers such as Amazon Kindle have proliferated in recent years, so have Ebook subscription services. For instance, VitalSource CourseSmart, which bills itself as “the world’s largest selection of textbooks as eTextbooks” claims up to 60% savings with digital compared to print textbooks.Chicago based RedShelf has jumped into the digital textbook subscription business, offering access to four of the top five textbook publishers to 120 colleges and universities.Instead of paying the price up front for a hard copy, the subscriptions are access-based, where subscribers pay to “rent” a particular title, the cost depending on the amount of time they need to access it.In an interview with Chicago Business, RedShelf co-founder Tim Haitaian said “We’ll tell publishers they’re not making any money off of the used books. They only make money the first time the book is sold, but they make money off every digital rental.” RedShelf’s rentals average between 120 and 180 days, just the amount of time needed for a semester’s worth of use.Despite the forecast of change by the Book Industry Study Group, and the implementation of a digital subscription model by RedShelf, the overall transition is just beginning as only 2% of textbooks sold are in a digital format.Regardless, for those in the subscription publishing industry, it will be interesting to watch how the textbook industry adapts to changing tastes in technology and delivery, and how they can monetize these changes as they pertain to digital subscriptions.
