School of Thought: Why Aren't E-Textbooks Selling

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. School of Thought: Why Aren't E-Textbooks Selling
You can probably guess what my answer would be to the question in the title: something about inflated costs, closed marketplaces, and stupid DRM. According to this article, the answer is "lack of knowledge, poor marketing and few choices." Yeah, right. That's what they said about New Coke. The more interesting bit, though, is an interview with the International Digital Publishing Forum's executive director, Nick Bogaty, who, as the article states, "wants to make file extension .ops to digital books what .mp3 is to music." OPS - the Open Publication Structure (OPS) and its sister format, the Open Packaging Format (OPF), are to textbooks what LOM is to learning objects, more or less. More...