Category Business models
UC Davis’s Plan to Disrupt Textbook Publishing
We are entering a period of real disruption in the textbook publishing industry, as the major textbook publishers are finding out that their strategy of continuously raising prices isn’t working anymore. As we saw a couple of weeks ago, Pearson’s new strategy includes taking over relationships with professors and students instead of ceding them to […]
Pearson Launches Digital-First Textbook Strategy
Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, announced on Tuesday that it is transitioning to a digital-first model for textbook publishing, moving away from the print-edition-based model that has been the foundation of higher education publishing for centuries. In its press release, the company announced that it will move almost all of its 1500 U.S. textbook […]
Cengage Learning Brings Subscriptions to Higher Ed Publishing
Cengage Learning, one of the major textbook publishers, announced last month that it has accumulated a million subscribers to the subscription college text content service, Cengage Unlimited, that it launched for the Fall 2018 semester. Students can subscribe for $120 per semester or $180 per year, with print textbook rentals available for a flat $7.99 […]
R.I.P. UV
Last week the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE) announced that it is winding down the UltraViolet system for interoperability of digital video. The service will shut down at the end of July. This step – widely seen as inevitable for the last couple of years – is a milestone in the gradual demise of consumer […]
Libraries: Be Careful What You Wish For
Last week we discussed the new “cost-per-circulation” (CPC) model for public libraries — in which they can make e-books available to patrons and pay the publisher per “loan” instead of paying fixed fees to “acquire” titles as if they were print books (the “pretend it’s print” or PIP model). HarperCollins has just become the first […]
Hoopla Digital and HarperCollins Disrupt Library E-Lending
An announcement this week by hoopla digital and HarperCollins augurs big changes in the ways that public libraries make e-books available. It sets the stage for realignment of the relationships between publishers and libraries, and it could have longer-term ripple effects on the entire e-book market. For more than a decade, public libraries have been […]
Big Data, Skinny Bundles
This past week, Google pre-announced a new live Internet TV service called YouTube TV. YouTube TV is a “skinny bundle”: a pay-TV service with a subset of channels commonly available on American cable and satellite TV at a price that’s lower than what pay-TV subscribers pay for TV programming. I used this announcement in my latest […]
The Myth of DRM-Free Music, Revisited
The most widely-read article on this blog these days one that I wrote two years ago called The Myth of DRM-Free Music. So I thought I’d follow up on it. I wrote that piece as a reaction to the popular story — which was coursing around the book publishing industry at the time — that Apple […]
Facebook Faces Copyright Issues Amid Video Explosion
It’s fairly well established by now — thanks to court decisions like Viacom v. YouTube and UMG v. Veoh — that online service operators have no legal duty to proactively police their services for potential copyright infringement. But that doesn’t mean that some services don’t do it anyway. The biggest example is Google’s Content ID system for YouTube, […]
Forbes: The Myth of Cord Cutting
In my latest piece in Forbes, I examine the idea of “cord cutting” in light of recent announcements from Viacom, Time Warner, and DISH Network of over-the-top (OTT) streaming video services that enable people in the US to watch pay TV channels without a pay TV subscription. Cord cutting means cancelling one’s subscription to cable […]
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