In a pre-holiday announcement on its blog, Google quietly pulled the plug on its attempt to help booksellers to sell ebooks: it announced the end of its reseller programme in which Google provided the technology for booksellers to sell ebooks from their own websites.

The move affects partners in the US, Canada, the UK and Australia. In Australia, partners Dymocks and Booktopia have only been selling Google Ebooks since Christmas. Other launches, including The Co-op Bookshop and QBD were planned. Resellers will have until January 2013 to find an alternative ebook platform or withdraw from the market. Booktopia already appears to have acted, with no sign of Google Ebooks on its site other than an old home page mention.

It’s important to note that Google isn’t pulling out of ebooks: it’s simply dropped its strategy of working with booksellers to help them sell ebooks.  “That effort — the reseller program — has not gained the traction that we hoped it would,” said Google on its blog.

Bringing bricks and mortar booksellers into the ebook revolution was always a brave — even noble — effort by Google, given how little online presence and expertise booksellers had. In fact, the scale of the challenge Google Ebooks faced was clear from its launch in December 2010 which included a high profile partnership with several hundred US indie booksellers. As we noted at the time:

Alas, early implementations by US booksellers are poor and show that both Google and the indie booksellers have a long way to go if they want to take share from established players such as Amazon and Kobo.

The indie booksellers that joined using the American Booksellers Association’s IndieBound platform used a simple search facility to integrate Google ebooks into their sites … . This won’t attract customers away from Amazon and its ilk. The only site I found that offered browsing and some sort of curated Google ebooks service, albeit fairly basic, was US indie Powells. All of this serves to underline just what a tough job indies will have getting into the game given their failure to embrace the web in any meaningful way.

As booksellers ponder their strategy in a post-Google world, the option of withdrawing from ebooks will no doubt be seriously considered by many. If Google’s clout wasn’t enough to crack this market for them, will any alternative be better? One thing that’s increasingly clear is that there is surprisingly little in common between offline and online bookselling. Google’s blog post hinted at this when it noted, “it’s clear that the reseller program has not met the needs of many readers or booksellers.” The reality is that most readers have shown little interest, or loyalty, when it comes to buying ebooks from their local bookstore: they prefer to buy from ebook specialists — often tied to the e-reader devices they own. And booksellers’ traditional strengths don’t translate well online.

For those booksellers who decide to stick with ebooks, there are now plenty of white label ebookstore suppliers who can step in to fill the gap left by Google. In Australia, home-grown offerings ReadCloud and Booki.sh could benefit. So could the Australian Publishers Association (APA) and Thorpe-Bowker who recently announced a partnership with US white label ebook provider Copia to power the forthcoming Titlepage Plus ebook service for booksellers.

But even with this backing, booksellers have a tough challenge ahead of them. Copia, with three years of development already behind it, still has some significant rough edges to iron out. Notable among them is its truly awful e-reading app which inexplicably requires scrolling through the ebooks (none of the easy page swipes that are offererd by all other e-readers); and it offers only basic formatting and a minimalist feature set. This is one of the most critical consumer-facing items so it’s surprising the service would launch in this state.

So, where to for Google? Google has rightly decided to focus its efforts on selling directly to the consumer as part of its larger Google Play store where ebooks join music, video and apps in the digital content business. This approach is closer to its major rivals Amazon and Apple who enjoy advantages from their direct strategy and the greater control it gives them over product and delivery.

Expect, too, that Google will move quickly to address one of the other gaps in its strategy — offering its own device  — something that has proved vital to the success of rivals, including ebook specialists Kobo and Barnes and Noble.

And perhaps we’ll also see Google quickly open its Ebooks store to the rest of the world: Until now, its policy has been to only sell ebooks in countries where it had established local partnerships.

[This article was originally published in the March 2012 issue of News on Bookselling, the magazine of the Australian Booksellers Association.]

This year will mark the fifth anniversary of Amazon’s launch of the Kindle, the

Source: AAP (Association of American Publishers)

event that triggered the spectacular rise of the ebook. Amazon has remained the biggest beneficiary of this growth, with its global market share estimated at 60 per cent or more. But changes are afoot that threaten its dominance and could shake up the whole market that has evolved around the ebook.

The catalyst is the release of new ebook formats that offer richer formatting and take advantage of new hardware. Late last year, the industry group behind the five year old EPUB standard released its successor, EPUB3, which will appear in ebook readers and apps during 2012. Shortly afterwards, Amazon announced Kindle Format 8 (KF8), successor to the venerable mobi format at the heart of the Kindle phenomenon. KF8, like EPUB3, is based on the new web standards of HTML5 and CSS3.

Both EPUB3 and KF8 open the door to highly illustrated and complex works, with EPUB3 having the edge through its support of video and a programming language called Javascript to add sophisticated interactive features. KF8 might add these later but they’re absent from the initial release, probably due to hardware limitations — Amazon is keen for some of its older, but under-powered, black and white Kindles to remain compatible. So far, only its new colour e-reader, the Kindle Fire, supports KF8.

These new formats might set the stage for Round Two of the battle between Amazon and the rest of the industry which has largely coalesced around the EPUB standard. But just weeks into the new year, things changed again when Apple fired a shot across the bow with iBooks 2. Apple’s iBooks app and its iBookstore support EPUB but iBooks 2 adds a new twist — a version of EPUB3 that is similar to, but incompatible with, the industry standard.

Apple cleverly made its initial target textbooks rather than trade ebooks although its technology can span both markets. Its strategy goes well beyond introducing its own format. The launch of iBooks 2 went hand-in-hand with a user-friendly authoring tool called Author which lets anyone, including teachers, authors and small publishers, produce these rich ebooks. The catch? If you want to sell an ebook made with Author, you have to sell it through Apple’s iBookstore.

Apple played another trump card to boost adoption of iBooks 2, launching the free iTunes U app. For several years, Apple has nurtured a section of its iTunes store called iTunes University which now features thousands of free video and audio courses from universities around the world. iTunes U opens this to schools (US only initially), integrates iBooks textbooks, and expands functionality with learning management system (LMS) features that manage courses and track students’ progress. All of this, combined with Apple’s deep roots in educational sales, is likely to make Apple and its hugely popular iPad a must-buy for education and a major market for digital textbooks. This popularity will likely spill over to the trade book market.

So, even before the first EPUB3 ebook goes on sale, we have three (incompatible) variations of the industry standard. For those of us who’ve followed technology markets over decades, and witnessed the tactics of dominant companies like Microsoft, this is deja vu. Microsoft, whose dominance is waning as mobile devices replace the PC as the centre of computing, is famous for its ‘embrace and extend’ approach to standards. It adopts a standard then adds incompatible ‘enhancements’, a strategy that carries through to the internet today with the so-called browser wars that mean websites look different in different web browsers. Expect ebooks to follow suit.

All of this manoeuvring will affect the book industry profoundly, including the emerging ebook ecosystem. The traditional dominant players — publishers and booksellers — will have little influence over its outcome and it’s a time when technology leadership might change, including Amazon’s dominance of the first major wave of ebooks.

Will traditional publishers still have a role? Probably. Unlike simple narrative works, the complexity and cost of producing high-end multimedia ebooks will demand the financial and human resources of big publishers. It’s unlikely the future digital Jamie Oliver cookbook blockbuster will be self-published — but will Oliver appoint Penguin, or a new player like BBC, perhaps through its Lonely Planet acquisition or US media giant NBC, both of which now have ebook operations with access to cash and multimedia expertise?

A fragmented ebook market might also upset existing ebook distribution channels. Ebooksellers like Kobo, Barnes and Noble, Google, and the many booksellers who use their technology, rely on the EPUB standard to access a large range of ebooks. This access will be threatened by demands from Amazon, Apple and some emerging players that sales go through their platforms. As ebooks become more complex to produce, publishers could start to limit the number of editions they support, making it harder for minority platforms to compete for top titles.

There are still plenty of pieces in this puzzle to emerge from both incumbent and new players — including the book’s print cousins, magazines and newspapers. But one thing is almost certain — the shift to rich media ebooks means positions that emerged in the past few years could change again. And yes, EPUB3 — the industry’s attempt to control the book’s digital evolution — and even Amazon if it missteps, could be casualties.

A company which believes it is Australia’s first digital-only trade publisher launched last week with a roster of titles from five Australian authors.

Really Blue Books publisher Sarah Bailey sees an opening in the market for a publisher with a digital-only focus prepared to promote new, creative talent. ”We are particularly keen to benefit and nurture our home-grown writers by providing them with an attractive alternative to self-publishing in the digital publishing realm,” she says.

The five titles available at launch are all fiction, including three young adult titles, but the company also plans to publish non-fiction. Bailey expects to publish between 20 and 40 titles in RBB’s first year.

eREPORT caught up with Bailey to find out why she and her business partner started Really Blue Books and what they plan to do differently from traditional publishers.

eREPORT: Tell us a little about Really Blue Books and why you’ve started it.

Sarah Bailey, Really Blue Books

SB: Really Blue Books is essentially your rogue epublisher and ebookshop of the modern digital publishing industry. Our aim is to be an island of quality and consumer trust in the sea of poor quality digital works created by widespread self-publishing and fluctuating pricing strategies.

While major publishers may only wish to consider their bottom lines and minimise risk in only publishing known authors, we wish to gain from a wider source and distribute back to the community. We are focused towards nurturing debut and current authors wishing to launch into digital as part of their professional writing careers. We are passionate about getting new talent out into the marketplace and we think that the readers will appreciate having a new, modern alternative with reasonable prices, providing accessible content in multiple formats.

eREPORT: What’s your background? Publishing? Technology?

SB: Both, luckily. Really Blue Books is run by myself and my brother, Sam Bailey. I am from an editorial/publishing background with a digital focus, and Sam is an expert in IT systems development and programming – the perfect collaboration of skills for creating ebooks and web-based platforms in the current market.

eREPORT: How do you get started as an indie digital publisher? Name brand authors with backlist rights reverted? Fresh new talent? Any signs that big authors are open to risk-taking to help start-ups? (They should be)

SB: I completed a Masters degree based around digital publishing and saw an opportunity unfolding in the market for digital start-ups. As we had the skills required to set up, and healthy egos, we decided to shake up the traditionalists and offer both authors and readers a new, modern option built specifically to cater to the ebook market sector.

It is one thing for existing publishers to adapt, re-skill and build new systems, and quite another to be purpose-built for the future market. So far, all our predictions and observations of the market have been realised, filling us with confidence as to the direction and method we’ve chosen. I’ve heard that RBB is to be cast as the Oracle in the next Matrix movie. Really.

As for our author base, I suspect many big authors are locked into long-winded, long-term contracts with their current publishers or see the safety in remaining with the known. While some previously published authors have found their way to our modest abode, they are ones who either have a particular interest in digital – the new market and its innovative possibilities, have found their current agents and publishers resistant to digital-based works, or have been bribed with delicious chocolate and excellent royalty rates (mostly chocolate though). Many submissions are coming from new talent and we’ve been pleasantly surprised at the volume and quality of the works bombarding our inboxes. It’s absolutely brilliant and very flattering!

eREPORT: What are your three or four key promotional strategies to cut through? How do you use digital marketing?

SB: Really Blue Books has to interact with customers through digital mediums to effectively communicate with those most interested in ebooks. Therefore social media, search engine optimisation and third-party customer bases are important to us. Reviews are still an important part of gaining reception, but word of mouth and viral advertising are even more effective when it comes to audience reach. We also have a few (top secret) strategies to distinguish RBB as a digital publisher with a difference, increasing interactivity, feedback, communication forms and accessibility. We are so entrenched and committed to digital that our office itself is virtual and yet all components – author, publisher, IT, customer etc. – can interact effectively. We ARE the Internet. Our long-range view of digital publishing is very, well, long.

eREPORT: What innovations will an indie publisher like yours introduce to the author/publisher relationship?

SB: We are currently building a web management system through which authors and their editors and publisher can interact, all working on the same manuscript. Authors will be able to check their manuscript’s status right from submission through production to completion and listing for sale.

Another of our ‘soon to come’ features is an RBB author-specific forum through which our authors can support each other in this digital sea of madness, working together to create ideas, give feedback, and summon lynch mobs into being to hold their errant publisher accountable should we stuff up.

Of course, our royalty rate is second to none and we believe in working WITH the author on their labour of love/ball and chain (choose appropriate) to create the best work possible for both sides of the partnership, rather than taking the faceless corporate mentality of content acquisition.

We even try to provide feedback and suggestions for as many submissions as possible. If authors have given us the privilege of reading their version of War and Peace, then it is our responsibility to afford each work the respect it deserves. Writing an entire novel is no easy task!

Also, as no doubt others are adapting to now, we acquire world rights to our titles. The Internet makes all distribution equal and we will see a huge reduction in the division of rights into territories.

eREPORT: Who else is doing what you’re doing in Australia and are there signs of a community developing?

SB: Surprisingly no one! Existing Australian publishers are converting their backlist and releasing new titles in print and digital simultaneously, and some, such as Pan Macmillan, have gone as far to launch new digital-only imprints. However, after a thorough search (and we’re happy to be proven wrong as we’d love to be part of a supportive digital community), Really Blue Books seems to be the only digital-only trade publisher in Australia. This is perhaps why we feel the need to develop our own community with our authors to bolster independent digital publishing and assist those new to digital with the transition and differences in reaching their audience.

eREPORT: How important is the DRM issue to the commercial success of what you’re doing (given that the vast majority of ebook sales go through ebooksellers with DRM applied)? If an author wants DRM, will you allow them to?

SB: DRM is a key issue for us. Huge. It cannot be disputed that as soon as a new version of DRM is created, it is cracked and the information widely available to any with access to a search engine. It seems pointless to us and unreasonably limiting for the consumer. We do not presume to tell the reader how to read their book. We are not a lending library as Amazon wishes to be.

There is no evidence that those who download pirated works would have otherwise purchased them, so it seems ridiculous to annoy customers by ineffectively preventing them from doing what we already know they will. You only have to look at the parallels between the book industry’s digital revolution and that of the music industry when Apple appeared with iTunes to see that DRM is unlikely to be a long-term solution to piracy, and we are anticipating that eventuality. Piracy has been an issue from the birth of books and is unlikely to be stopped now by a few lines of code, hence we do not see any commercial liability in pursuing this path.

If an author was particularly keen on having DRM applied to their work, then there are plenty of other publishers out there who will happily comply (and will see no other option). In fact, at the Digital Book World Conference recently, publishers have been advised to drop DRM for their titles, as we have anticipated. This stance is an integral part of our company philosophy and is non-negotiable in our contracts. It is the author’s challenge, should they choose to accept it.

eREPORT: Tell us about your list and the titles you’ll have available at launch.

SB: We plan to publish somewhere between 20 and 40 titles in our first year. It may sound excessive (and vague) but the size and type of publication can vary, as can the amount of editing, design and production required to get Cinderella to the Ball.

We have five titles for launch:

• THEM by Adrian Deans (author of Mr Cleansheets) – adult speculative fiction in an Australian setting
• Kiss Kill by Jeni Mawter (author of the ‘SO’ series published by HarperCollins) – a unique transmedia teenage fiction novel
• Milo and I by Antony Mann – digital release of his UK and Japan published adult crime fiction short stories with a comedic twist
• Repetition by Elissa de Heer – debut teenage fiction novel
• Pendulum by Nick Duhigg – debut teenage fiction novel

Our ebooks are available from our website and web management system which will be our main, and cheapest, distribution platform from a consumer viewpoint.

Technology researcher Forrester released a survey of US publishing executives yesterday which uncovered an interesting disconnect: 82% were optimistic about the digital transition of books, but only 28% thought their own company would be stronger as a result. The explanation?

“Publishers have started to do the hard work of making the digital transition and they’re finding that it is, indeed, hard work,” says James McQuivey, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

The hard work has probably been delayed by early windfall profits from ebook backlists, with major publishers still reporting good results, despite the mayhem in the book trade.

But if the transition is going to be successful for incumbent print players, it will need a shift in thinking. The biggest barrier is the widely-held idea that ebooks are just another format. They’re not.

It’s an easy idea that reassures staff and stakeholders and provides a potential lifeline for the existing business. But it’s damaging because it leads publishers to focus on the similarities and overstate their advantages. These similarities are much less important than the differences.

The paperback was just another format. It fitted neatly into the same business model and the same supply chain. It had the bonus of delivering everyone more business. Cheaper books brought armies of new buyers to buy the same books from the same group of sellers through the same channels.

But digital isn’t like this.

• The supply chain is completely different. The companies driving the structure of the ebook industry are technology companies, not publishers, booksellers or book distributors.
• The economics are different. That includes both the overall cost structure and the marginal cost of delivering one more unit anywhere in the world.
• The value proposition to the reader is different. That means price but it also means a host of other benefits. And the ability to instantly access your books or buy any book 24/7 from anywhere is a killer app, no matter how much you love the feel and smell of paper.
• The barriers to entry are different. They’re both lower (for a publisher/self-publisher) and impossibly high (for most booksellers). And soon Google Ebooks and a beefed-up Amazon partner programme might flip this around again and make the entry barrier so low that not only indie bookstores but every website and blogger will be able to sell ebooks.
• The value chain and power relationships among major participants are radically different. If you want proof of this, you only need to see how Random House was backed into a corner by agent Andrew Wiley. The reason? No one believed one of the world’s biggest trade book publishers had any more power getting an ebook to its readers than a miniscule start-up.
• The content will be different once the digital tail starts wagging the print dog and richer digital editions diverge, instead of being cheap replicas of print-ready PDFs. Of course, this can be an opportunity for big publishers — or big new entrants — to shine.
• The rights are different. Authors don’t have to tie the two formats together and increasingly they won’t. Publishing and distributing narrative works as ebooks is actually easy and inexpensive, and plenty of service providers and ebooksellers are jumping in to help authors.
• Major customers are different. How much time do publishers spend peddling ebooks to today’s most important customer group, bricks and mortar booksellers? Almost none. How important are sales reps for ebooks? Not very.
• Marketing is different. If your book is digital, almost nothing in a traditional book marketing plan is relevant. Scratch everything tied to bookstores (all the in-store, most author touring). Reviewers are usually different (bloggers, readers — most traditional reviewers don’t review ebooks though that will change in time). Merchandising happens online.
• Most jobs are different. Many—possibly most—skills are different from those found in a traditional book company, whether publishing or supply chain. Whether you’re selling ebooks (to whom? how?), marketing them (how? to whom?), producing or editing them (books as software), your job in an ebook business will be different. Very different in many cases.

So just how different must ebooks be before they’re not just another format? I know from personal experience the challenges CEOs face as they’re torn between serving existing customers, resource demands and processes; and giving new ones the freedom, resources and fresh-thinking to grow. What they almost always do is tether an exploding new business to a limping old one in the name of synergy — and to cover the old business’s overheads.

But how much synergy did Amazon need when it got into online bookselling in the mid 1990s? Jeff Bezos had an IT degree and worked on Wall Street. He’d never sold books. How much synergy did Barnes and Noble leverage when it completely failed to get into the game? This article from Fortune magazine of September 27, 1997 is a great example of an incumbent overstating the value of what it brings:

The big guys can just as easily join the fun. Barnes & Noble, the nation’s leading bookseller, opened its own online bookshop (at www.barnesandnoble.com) three months ago and has swiftly exposed the tenuousness of Amazon’s head start. It turns out that figuring out the sexy new stuff, like Web pages and online order taking, is a lot less difficult than figuring out such drudgery as how to cost-effectively finance, stock, and move the physical stuff, the books.

Anything Amazon.com can do on the Internet, so, too, can Barnes & Noble. “There was a mystique about how difficult it was to get started on the Web,” says Steven Riggio, chief operating officer of Barnes & Noble, “but it’s quickly fading.”

In fact this article— and B&N — were 180 degrees wrong. Barnes & Noble failed miserably, Amazon shone. It turns out that the ‘sexy new stuff’ is actually hard and important, and the ‘drudgery’ of the old business was much easier to figure out (and mostly irrelevant to online success). The guy who came to work every day to sweat over the new stuff, without distraction or compromise, won.

Says Ingram Book Group CEO John Ingram in this insightful Q&A:

Publishers have two business models to run: a legacy print model and a new digital one. What competencies are needed now? And if they’re different competencies, and I think they probably are, how do you pay for those? How can the business be restructured so that cash can be created to pay for new things that need to happen?

Unfortunately, very few legacy businesses can sever their digital arms to give them the best chance to compete. The reason: doing this will create huge internal problems. Everyone will be frustrated, nothing will seem to work, communication between the print and digital businesses will be terrible. Out in the real world, it won’t matter, but inside the company it will become a major issue. So the digital business will be reined in and have to serve two masters.

Is this why executives in the Forrester survey are pessimistic about their own company’s chances of winning?

Creating ‘synergies’ with the legacy business — which the ‘just another format’ thinking encourages — too often ends up being a straitjacket for the new one. That’s pennies from heaven for those upstart new competitors.

Apple made several announcements yesterday which can drive the textbook’s digital transformation — or, in Steve Jobs’ more colourful phrase, its “digital destruction”. My pick is that this will  be the tipping point for educational publishing, its ‘iPod moment’ or ‘Kindle moment’ when the market suddenly takes off. But Apple’s moves will go much further than textbooks.

While the technology is important, Apple has a unique combination of assets to pull off a home run in the education market. Unlike major rivals such as Amazon and Google, which are consumer-focused, Apple has deep roots in education. This includes a large, highly-skilled direct sales force with strong relationships in schools and universities around the world. It has big support in education where Apple regularly jostles for top spot in market share around the world.

Before looking at the implications of its announcements, here’s a brief summary.

• iBooks 2.0. This is a rich media ebook format for Apple’s iBooks e-reader app. Apple’s move follows the release of Amazon’s KF8 format for the Kindle, and EPUB3 which is the rich media upgrade to the industry’s own EPUB standard. While iBooks 2.0 is based closely on EPUB3 (as is Kindle’s KF8), it’s not compatible. Unlike the Kindle KF8 and EPUB3 announcements, which were primarily focused on the general consumer ebook market, Apple chose to launch its rich media format with textbooks as its main target. But the format can, and no doubt will, serve as a general purpose ebook format.
• iBooks Author is a free — and impressive — tool to create rich ebooks in the iBooks 2.0 format. Author is aimed at regular users, like teachers and self-publishers. What is especially interesting is that Apple’s concept of a textbook production tool shares a lot in common with elearning rapid authoring tools such as Articulate and Adobe Captivate, with their quizzes, interactions, and Powerpoint/Keynote integrations.
• Apple’s iBookstore gets a textbook category to sell textbooks in the new iBooks 2.0 format.
• iTunes U gets some major changes. In many ways, iTunes U is likely to be the biggest part of Apple’s play, even though it’s received less attention. iTunes U is the free educational podcast section of iTunes which  has more than 1000 universities from 20 countries including Australia and New Zealand who provide some great educational content. Apple’s changes will open it up to schools as well (US only for now). A new app, the iTunes U app, lets teachers create courses and students access them. And the new web-based iTunes U Course Manager provides the sort of course creation and delivery features found in a full-fledged LMS (learning management system) like Moodle, the widely-used open source LMS.

Apple’s moves have been met with a great deal of publishing industry scepticism and disquiet. Critics of iBooks 2 have focused on two main areas:

1. Its format ties it to Apple devices: You can’t read iBooks 2.0 on anything but an Apple device, and Author is Mac-only.
2. Its distribution is tied to Apple’s iBookstore, unless you want to give your textbook away. The terms of use for iBooks Author, the tool for producing the new format, prohibit paid sales from anywhere but Apple’s iBookstore.

Neither of these is a good thing for the industry. But focusing on these areas is likely to throw publishers off recognising what is fundamentally right about Apple’s strategy. Apple can, and probably will, open up its platform when the time is right, just as it did by making key applications like iTunes available on the Windows platform.

Apple’s strategy is very smart and potentially very big. Here’s why.

The thread that runs through these announcements is the convergence of ebooks and elearning. Elearning and ebooks have followed parallel paths but seldom intersected. Apple sees that most textbooks, once digital, will be closer to elearning courseware than ebooks. With iTunes U and iBookstore, Apple has cleverly opened two distribution channels for digital textbooks.

And guess what? In spite of its partnerships with major textbook publishers at the announcement, Apple doesn’t see them leading this convergence. With its simple-to-use tools and distribution channels, Apple (rightly) picks that packaging and distributing educational content is something teachers and students, not publishers, should do, just as they do with classroom learning. A deluge of free content, neatly packaged and easily shared among teachers, will be a powerful incentive to buy into Apple’s ecosystem. And those users will in turn make Apple’s ecosystem an essential target for publishers’ paid content.

Apple’s move will boost the nascent open source content movement by providing high quality tools and extensive distribution for sharing educational content. This attacks the heart of traditional publishing but for Apple, what it loses in iBooks sales it more than gains from hardware and services.

There will certainly be a place for publishers, but it’s going to be quite different from providing today’s static, uniform textbooks. And it’s more likely to be based on selling specialised services or licensing quality content elements for digital mashups. Expect to see iTunes U adding a content licensing repository at some point in the future with educational terms more liberal than today’s contracts offer.

While publishers like to focus on the importance of great content as a value-creator, it’s going to grab a smaller chunk of the educational value chain in future.

Most of the textbook market has so far resisted digital transformation. It’s been fragmented with no effective solution. Unlike the simple narrative ebook sold by Amazon, the digital textbook market is complex in structure, content, sales process, and delivery. It’s lacked a standard technology with easy-to-use tools to produce interactive, rich media ebooks; and a distribution model that is scalable enough to reach deep into education. Apple’s latest package of announcements, combined with its unique assets, is big enough and good enough to fill that vacuum.

So whether Apple ends up dominating educational publishing or being one player among many, the path it set out with yesterday’s announcements will define the way educational publishing heads into its digital future.