The video actually threw me off. My cursor was right there, very confused for a sec - imo it's not separated enough from the rest of the experience for it to be entirely helpful, felt like more of a distraction. Just my $.02, cool site outside of that one small thing!
I run a price comparison site for textbooks, SlugBooks. There are two simple factors which impact slow adoption of digital books:
1) college bookstores. It's a distribution issue. Students are used to walking into the bookstore to buy something. The bookstore is used to selling them something. Digital books hurt that experience so there's an inherent disadvantage to bookstores promoting digital. This is as big a factor as any.
2) price. Publishers think they've priced digital books fairly, because they use the full retail value as their point of reference. Instead of paying $200 for a full retail copy, students will surely pay $100 for a digital rental, right? They fail to understand that digital books are going to be acquired online, meaning there is a greater chance students purchasing these books will be comparing prices. College bookstores which offer digital as an option even compare that price to their other (often more affordable) options, like buying it used. That $100 digital rental is frequently available for less than $60 on Amazon or sites like it.
It's not a feature problem, it's distribution and really bad pricing.
Until publishers pay attention to these things, digital will never catch on (regardless of how much they innovate technology).
Wrote this case study for Usabilla's blog. Hopefully it provides some design inspiration if you've been thinking of doing a reskin. We had a lot of fun with ours.
few takeaways (having just gone thru the same experience of launching our first app in July)
1) don't assume that because you're bootstrapping, you "have to charge something for the app". View free/paid as two different marketing channels (that's really all that they are). With free apps - they are ad, in-app purchase and/or lead supported - while paid apps support themselves. There is no right or wrong way to monetize, but by having one of each, you're eligible in both top app chart categories, which helps.
2) you may have benefited from this (or maybe you didn't) - but one thing that surprised me was the market for "apps gone free". We released our app as a free app at first, but once the downloads started to fall off, we figured "what the hell, let's make it paid" after which we rose even higher in the rankings on the paid side than we ever achieved on the free side. Then when paid installs started to fall off, we switched the app back to free, which had a surprising result: it got picked up by all of these "apps gone free" feeds (tons of blogs subscribe to app pricing updates - so it was suddenly eaten up by this niche market of users who download all of the apps that recently became free). Granted - these weren't engaged users, but it padded download stats for a few days. When that happened we experienced our best two free install days ever before normalizing again.
Interesting to see your stats, thanks for sharing.
Typically there are 1-2 copies on reserve at the library, but you can only check them out for a couple hours at the time. With a class of 50+ students that's not a workable solution for most. And most don't even try anyway..
Some universities take it a step further and include the cost of textbooks in tuition. Be glad that isn't happening globally. That's the worst case scenario here - students are just billed for course materials without having any say in the matter.
Note that their stats about how rentals save students $1160 a year are sort of BS. On books where renting saves you a lot of money over the full retail price (which no one ever pays anyway), you can usually just buy the book outright for the same amount on Amazon (and then sell it back when youre done for a ridiculously lower total cost of ownership).
Just come out with a new edition each year where you move the problems around so that people have to buy the new textbook and cannot buy used. And in the occasional case where that does not work, change the title of the book occasionally so that students do not know which second hand book to buy.
Custom editions and packaged access codes are the last futile attempt that publishers bookstores and professors have against cheaper Internet alternatives. The one thing your writeup didn't touch upon is digital textbooks- which the publishers actually love since eBooks are usually rentals, so the secondary markets like Amazon and AbeBooks are cut out.
I am from SlugBooks- a web app that compares prices between the college bookstore and online options for ~800 universities in US and Canada. This topic hits close to home. We've been watching bookstores and publishers do this for years, and it's only getting worse. When professors assign customized or packaged books, it becomes nearly impossible to save money through sites like Amazon.
The most surprising thing is how many professors eat up the bullshit that custom editions actually help. They're supposed to be champions of critical thinking. Profs WANT to save students money - that's why they opt for custom editions (since publishers tell them it will save their students money). It's just sad.
I had one college course with a custom edition and we still had the option of using the regular edition, (all the page numbers were the same the custom editions only difference was a lack of extra chapters that we weren't going to cover).
The custom edition was cheaper than the regular edition and this is the only reason the professor did this. The book didn't seem to have very many used copies being sold as it was an advanced class and people were more likely to keep the book than sell it.
Just providing context to how a custom edition can be cheaper if the professor does work.
I've also had many professors write their own book and give it for free in pdf or let you buy it for $20 at the university copy center already bound with the option of buying supplemental books that they thought were of good quality.
Maybe my engineering department was different but it seemed most of my professors tried to work to help the students not have to pay large amounts.
Hey, thanks for this. There are corner cases where custom editions make sense, but overall they cause far more harm than good.
-The biggest issue is that custom editions segment the global secondary market for a given textbook into slivers of useless fragments. Instead of Campbell Biology, Regular Edition being bought and sold between Stanford students and students at every other college in the country (this significant supply drives the price down), Campbell Biology, Stanford Custom Edition is only ever going to be bought/sold by Stanford students. This hurts students in multiple ways: 1) the bookstore is the only place they can BUY the book from. Period. 2) the bookstore is the only place they can SELL the book too. Custom editions are a perfect storm for bookstores/publishers.
-Custom editions are cheaper than what the regular edition costs in terms of what the bookstore would charge for each, but if you compare prices on the regular edition online, there are usually significantly cheaper prices out there than what the custom is being sold for at the bookstore.
-In the rare case where a custom edition is being used, but a regular edition is acceptable - the bookstore presenting both options and telling you to pick one will almost never result in you considering that the regular edition would be cheaper online. By adding this extra noise, they artificially make custom books look more affordable.
I agree - there are tons of professors that are on the right side of this fight. Textbooks SHOULD be free. And the fact that custom editions are even adopted is proof that professors care about students. They're just a terribly poor solution which reinforces the problem instead of solving it.
Give the publishers credit - custom editions are a genius business move.
As unhappy as I am with the publishers, I agree that custom textbooks are a brilliant business move. It's no wonder why they send in sales teams - it's very lucrative!
It's like Windows - Windows 7 OEM is about $100 and is tied to your mobo, while a retail Windows 7 can be used on a different machine. The retail version probably has a lower TCO.
Yep, kayak for textbooks. You can either search by book or search by school/course. If you really want to get angry, look up MATH 203 at Medgar Evers College in NY. A textbook with a list price of $174 is being sold for $330 new, $240 used - available from online sites for less than $10.
There are over 16,000 classes across the country that can save >$100 on their books. Haven't run the numbers yet but the use of custom materials/access codes has EXPLODED, which prevents savings.
We are diff than other comparison engines bc of that course search component. Most students don't realize how easy it is to save (it's surprisingly daunting for students to do this the first time), we facilitate that process.
Kyro - I think it's ridiculous that people are so possessive of free design concepts, but one cool blog post to take a look at is Metalab's theoretical redesign of the Zappos homepage few year's back: http://metalabdesign.com/zappos/
They do a pretty nice job of explaining why and what they did - might be a nice framework if you're planning on justifying your decisions.
I personally find these designs more "fun to look at" than anything - it's always cool to see what and how someone who isn't a part of the day to day sees a product as. To me, these designs are just a super detailed pieces of user feedback. Keep going at it!
That page does mention some good design principles, then proceeds to just throw a couple gradients and Gotham on a Photoshop mockup. The HN thread about it discussed at length why it's a weak redesign.
