McGraw-Hill launched its first all-digital textbook that targets the K-12 market on Monday. The announcement was made during the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) conference.
Textbook makers have good reason to innovate in this area. K-12 textbook sales this April -- traditionally the start of the classroom curriculum buying period -- dropped more than 15% since the same time last year, according to the Association of American Publishers. Digital books might offer one way to help reverse the trend.
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Digital textbooks for younger grades are usually less lucrative than those for higher education. K-12 textbooks are traditionally provided by schools, many of which lack hardware to ensure that all of their students can access them. Polly Stansell, director of product development for McGraw-Hill, acknowledges "it's a pretty small market if you rely on one-to-one" sales. But she cites rotating carts that some schools have set up to give students computer access at some points in the day -- and a trend of allowing kids to bring their own devices to school.
McGraw-Hill's new format, CINCH, is a cloud-based curriculum for K-12 math and 7-12 science. It makes all course materials, which include ebooks, presentations, assessments and animation clips, available from any device with a browser. Students in a class can also participate in Facebook-like conversations that stay with the text. "We're trying to meet students and teachers where they're at digitally," Stansell says.
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Unlike McGraw-Hill's previous digital efforts for this age group, the books are intended to be used as primary texts (other McGraw-Hill digital texts have been sold as a companion of physical textbooks). McGraw-Hill will also be launching a new payment model with CINCH: schools will be charged for each student to use the textbooks on a yearly basis. It comes out to about the cost of a workbook for each student.
Another publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has taken another tack on making digital textbooks more appealing to the K-12 market. At the same conference, it announced schools that implement its supplemental online product, SkillsTutor, will now be provided with hardware at favorable pricing as a result of a new partnership with Intel and Equus Computer.
Also at ISTE, Pearson announced that its digital K-8 program for mathematics and reading would be joining McGraw-Hill's new CINCH texts on the cloud.
This story originally published on Mashable here.
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