The Education Business Blog

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Flocabulary - Much Ado About Nothing Rap from Flocabulary on Vimeo.

In an age of information overload Librarians are the pilots who can help us quickly navigate to what is meaningful.

Said differently - librarian's rock and they make a huge difference in schools. Here is a video made by a school for a library aid who got laid off due to the budget crisis. Think this "saving" won't make a big difference in the education of these children?

Watch the video.

Yes - she is my lovely wife. She will find new work, but this work resonated with her soul and she was damn good at it. Thousands of young learners are better off because they crossed paths with her.

She and thousands of other educators who were dedicated and loved by their students will not be there in the fall when school reopens.

Think about that the next time someone bashes teachers to make political hay.

The role of textbooks in a rapidly digitizing world is an open question. The publishing industry needs to develop a new paradigm for commercially produced instructional materials or it faces extinction.

• Will they be replaced by digital learning packs of atomized content?
• Will Professors self-publish whatever materials they need?
• Will piracy destroy the textbook market?
• Are static textbooks even relevant any more when information is exploding at an exponential rate?

Now, thanks to the folks at Nature (a division of MacMillan) and their new eTextbook Principles of Biology, I glimpse a promising path forward. As is so often the case with paradigm shifts once it "clicks" in your head it is so simple that you wonder that you didn't get it earlier.
Better late than never I guess.

The product itself is innovative but from what I can tell not groundbreaking. It won't ship until September but from the description it sounds similar to Our Choice or Roma, excellent examples of cutting edge iPad publishing for non-fiction.

The New Model

The real innovation is in the business model. There are two elements of their model that are game changers.

A. Lifetime access to updated content. I think most grads have a few core textbooks that we still reference for our vocational and avocational interests. Personally I've gone to the well with Principles of Corporate Finance and Roman History over the years. But both of those fields have moved on since I studied them decades ago. It would be a huge value add if I had regular updates as each field advances and the materials are changed.

Right now publishers leave this value add on the cutting floor. We have to update our materials anyway to keep the content current but we have no way of passing that work on to prior customers. If that can be done digitally with a marginal cost of close to $0 it is a big win for the student and the publisher. It provides a compelling reason to purchase rather than pirate.

B. Site license purchases that can be bundled into tuition. This change has two important aspects.

First - site license pricing will upend one of the inequities in the college textbook market. The decision makers (professors) and the purchasers (students) are two separate entities and the purchasers have very little individual buying power. By uniting the decision and the purchase in an entity with a great deal of purchasing power (the University) it should help control costs while delivering a superior product. Publishers will have a huge amount of costly friction removed from the market as well (stocking college bookstores).

Second - there is a perception that textbooks are an out of control cost. If colleges broke out the cost of the new stadium or the Faculty Club you might see more outrage over tuition hikes. Compared to tuition which has doubled every 9 years since 1958 (roughly double the rate of general inflation), textbooks are a bargain. Textbooks are a small fraction of tuition and haven't increased anything close to that rate. But, because they are a direct purchase by students they get a lot more scrutiny.

If costs are controlled from site license purchasing and bundled into tuition the perception that textbooks are a rip off might subside. The schools benefit by building a lifelong connection to the student as well (assuming their subscription travels with them at graduation).

In the end this would make the university textbook market a lot more like the K12 market where states and districts make the buying decisions.

Conclusion

For K12 the far bigger innovation here is the lifetime "membership" in a textbook that comes from creating a student account. Building, nurturing, and adding value to that relationship over the long haul is a completely new way of thinking about our business.

For Higher Education the site license shift will have huge implications for who, what, and how instructional materials are purchased. It will upend a lot of sacred cows so it won't go down easily ("no Professor, you don't get to choose any book you want...") and it isn't a panacea (e.g. it won't solve the problem of the cost of niche materials).

In both cases the economics are pretty compelling and point to a way forward for publishers that skirts the piracy issue with innovation rather than enforcement.

Next

In a future post I'll write about the challenges for publishers if they begin to implement these ideas on a broad scale. These changes will upend decades of established business practice, process, and systems.

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Hat tip to Michael Cairns over at Personanondata for highlighting this topic.

The International Reading Association's annual conference has been steadily declining in attendance (and thus importance to vendors) for several years now. From a draw of 20,000 attendees the show now attracts less than 8,000. From a content standpoint it remains a top drawer event. That isn't the focus of this piece. I'm making a more mercenary assessment of the event from a marketing perspective.

Reading Language Arts remains the single biggest segment of instructional materials spending (over 60%). Exploring why the show at the heart of the education market is getting smaller should reveal some telling lessons for vendors evaluating how they go to market these days.

This year's exhibit traffic was considerably better than last year's, but the show floor was still a shadow of its former glory. Vendor booths barely filled 70% of the exhibit hall and other than a couple of the major publishers (notably Scholastic) most companies were taking less space than they did even 2-3 years ago.

The vendor commitments to my eye appeared to be scaled appropriately for the opportunity. PCI and others were having substantive conversations with customers actively seeking solutions.

What follows is my own rough estimation of the key factors in the show's decline. These themes will look familiar to regular readers.

• Centralized Decision Making
• Technology Substitution
• The Internet
• The Economic Downturn

Centralized Decision Making

NCLB's accountability measures changed the dynamic of the whole market. With jobs on the line administrators pulled decisions from teachers and principals. Simply put there are fewer people involved in making decisions about what to buy and when they are purchasing they are making bigger more comprehensive decisions.

Rationally Districts are simply sending fewer people because fewer people need to be involved in making decisions about what they are doing about reading.

This isn't all bad from a vendor standpoint. If smaller decisions get bundled the size of the market hasn't changed all that much. This would explain why vendors like Scholastic who offer comprehensive core programs have largely maintained their presence. Even supplemental solutions, if they are complete programs, are attractive to these buyers.

From a traditional supplemental vendor's perspective this has been a disaster. Individual teachers no longer show up seeking targeted solutions for this year's crop of learners. They are not coming to buy a book on spiders or space travel. The administrators are looking for complete libraries.

Vendors should show up with a smaller footprint and with their complete solutions in tow. Leave the little supplemental stuff behind for your web site. In large part this is what appears to have happened.

But there are three other factors that are driving the change.

Technology Substitution

But for all that the most striking thing about the exhibit area at IRA is the absence of technology. It is still primarily a book show. Yes, Scholastic, Pearson, and Study Island all had tech presences there (along with many others). But, wandering the aisles one saw rack after rack filled with Ghandi biographies, turtle books, and teen vampire sagas.

This raises the question of relevance. Educators are starting to demand some element of technology in every purchase they make, even if it is just PDF's on a CD. It reminds me of when standards swept into the market and it became impossible to start a sales conversation without first demonstrating that you were standards aligned. Not many people used those alignments - but they simply would not consider products that didn't have them. The same is true of technology today.

I wonder if part of the problem is that for many educators a show that is fixated on books simply isn't as relevant as something like ISTE. Changing this dynamic at IRA has to become a joint project of both the association and the vendor community. Books are not going away, but books without some kind of tech hook don't have the draw needed to keep the event vibrant.

There are small but concrete steps that could encourage this - like getting the convention center to waive their ridiculous $99 charge per internet connection. There is lots more that could be done to encourage vendors who are attending to flog their tech and to recruit tech vendors who have reading solutions to attend.

The challenge here is cultural more than it is practical. The people who belong to IRA generally love books and want to celebrate them. But we can't afford to ignore the cold hard fact that much of our teen's reading is moving to pixels. Failing to emphasize that reality is undercutting the long term relevance of the show.

The Internet

The economic downturn is accelerating a inevitable transition to early information gathering via the web in place of trade shows. As noted elsewhere one of the central questions marketers need to resolve today is the mix between trade shows and web presence.

Trade show conversations have always clustered at the ends of the purchase process. Districts just starting to explore their options review a lot of products in one sweep of the floor to set a baseline of what they should be evaluating. At the other end Districts realizing they need to spend budget dollars quickly are out trying to nail down what needs to go into POs that have to be cut in the next 90 days.

In normal times the skew is to the folks just starting out with a few lucky bluebirds tossed in. Conferences this year have the reverse mix as folks scramble to spend the last of their stimulus money. More significantly the folks at the front end of the process are using the web more frequently instead of going to shows.

Companies need to be acutely aware of what this means for their on-line presence. If you think of your website as a 24/7/365 trade show booth instead of brochureware you start to do some very different things with your product pages. Think carefully about all the information someone just starting out with a purchasing decision needs and make sure it is easily downloadable. More importantly think about the terms they will use at the start of the process (hint - not the same as at the end) and make sure you are optimizing for those phrases.

If your flagship products still just have a cover shot, an ISBN, and a price you are going to get your lunch eaten in this new world.

The Economy

One of the major challenges for all education trade shows is the difficulty of justifying travel and convention costs at a time when districts are laying off staff and slashing programs. Unfortunately this trend line isn't set to improve for a couple more years, so this impact of the downturn will linger on through 2014 or 2015.

This has had an impact, but I would argue that it is far less than the other factors. It also isn't something the show community has much control over. As a community we need to focus our efforts on addressing the first three issues.

Conclusion

IRA continues to struggle for a relevant identity in a world that is rapidly moving to reading on-line and on the go. The economy is accelerating a trend towards on-line fact finding early in the buying process making the exhibit area less attractive to vendors. The event also needs to move much more aggressively to a blended print/technology focus.

Email marketing is pretty simple - as much as possible communicate with people who want to hear from you. But a subset of these folks just don't get it.

If I go to the trouble of clicking "unsubscribe" please do not send me ANOTHER FRICKING EMAIL CONFIRMING I NO LONGER WANT EMAIL FROM YOU.

It insures that I move from the "mildly annoyed" column to "actively pissed off at your company" status.

I'd put their names up - but that would only encourage them. No links for dinks.

Sheesh.