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RSS feedsAcademic and science, technical and medical (STM) publishers predict that the internet will dominate university text book delivery in the near future, but the book is not dead. Speaking at the Publishers Association International Division conference delegates from Macmillan and Wiley agreed on the increasingly important role the internet will play for text books.
"The text book is transferring to online provision," said Dominic Knight, Palgrave Macmillan managing director in an interview with IWR. At the conference Knight described the text book market as "on the verge of radical change because of the growth of the internet".
Jamie Marshall, associate publishing director at Palgrave Macmillan , the academic publishing company, said: "all educational material will be available online, and a lot of core material such as big textbook packages will be available only in an online form".
Knight was keen to defend the traditional text book though, "It is not dead. Text books and online material could be bought is range of different packages in the future."
Marshall said it was highly likely that the e-book would emerge as a viable, inexpensive technology ( read full story on e-book demand ), and pay-as-you-go content would develop. "With virtual learning environments being developed the universities are looking for material to be delivered in chapter sized chunks," Knight said of the changing information environment developing in universities.
"There is increasingly a demand from students for 'slabs' of information - they are willing to pay - but only for that one bit of information," Marshall said.
A challenge facing publishers and information professionals is the changing perception of information value. " Wikipedia for example may well become 'good enough' for students and that is a challenge we will have to look at closely," Knight said, adding" Students might well say that something which is free and does 80% of the job is OK, so they don't want to pay for 100%."
