According to a survey of college students, "if all things were equal (price and availability), students would choose to use e-textbooks 47% of the time" versus print text books. The knee jerk headlines are that good old fashioned printed text books are still favored by a lot of students, so slow down all of the predictions of the revolutionary market.
But what if this survey is done five years from now, with students who have lived in the world of iPad since they were pre-teens? I bet it will be much higher. And when my kids (ages 2 and 5) are approaching college, or even in high school after living with advanced mobile devices their entire remembered life? I'm sure they will be much closer to 100% than 50%.
So given the time to develop products and markets, I would bet right now on demand for a totally digital text book.
This reminds me of when I was in college in the mid-late 1990s during the earliest adoption on the Internet. Here is a study from 1997 that looked at whether college students would want to use email and computers for education. The conclusion? There's not a big demand from students. Even "when students are given large incentives to use e-mail, over a quarter of the students in one class did not."
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