Education publishing huge business : Reason for Apple's move into space
I watched news of Apple’s move into education publishing this last week with passing interest until I saw the size of the education publishing business.
As reported by the New York Times’ Brian Chen (@bxchen) and Nick Wingfield (@NickWingfield), Apple introduced tools to someday supplant print textbooks.
Apple wants students to stop lugging around backpacks full of heavy textbooks and to switch to the iPad instead.
On Thursday the company introduced three free pieces of software revolving around education. It released iBooks 2, a new version of its electronic bookstore, where students can now download textbooks; iBooks Author, a Macintosh program for creating textbooks and other books; and iTunes U, an app for instructors to create digital curriculums and share course materials with students.
Digital textbooks made for iBooks can display interactive diagrams, audio and video. The iBooks Author app includes templates made by Apple, which publishers and authors can customize to suit their content.
Tim Carmody of Wired (@tcarmody) reports you can’t understand Apple’s interest in breaking into the education market without at least a little understanding of that market’s scope.
The biggest publishers in the world today are education publishers.
It’s not even close. In 2009, Pearson’s Education division alone brought in more revenue than any other book publisher besides number two, Reed Elsevier, whose biggest businesses are Lexis-Nexis and Elsevier Science.
Education publishers dwarf trade presses. Only the top trade press, Random House (itself owned by Bertelsmann) is bigger than Cengage, the little-known education publishing division that Thomson spun off in 2008 before merging with Reuters.
Education publishers are even bigger than many media companies.
Pearson is far bigger than AOL or The New York Times Company (and much more profitable). In order to find publishers with greater revenue or profits, you have to go up the ladder to companies like News Corp that include global television markets, or retail entities, like Amazon. This makes companies like Pearson too big to ignore, especially when they’re willing to partner up…….Let’s suppose you don’t really care about textbooks. Pearson also owns Penguin, the world’s second largest trade publisher. They also own the Financial Times and a 50% share of The Economist.
That’s the same Penguin that partnered with Apple to help launch iBooks along with the iPad. And that’s the same Financial Times that proved publishers could bypass the App Store’s 30% cut and still grow their subscriber base on iPhone and iPad.
The move to a digital world is opening my eyes to how big the publishing industry is. The B2B information services business led by the likes of Wolters Kluwer, Reed Elsevier, and Thomson Reuters, all of whom are huge players in the legal space, is a $2 Billion business alone.
USA TODAY’s Edward Baig (@edbaig), also writing on Apple’s move, reports Steve Jobs had long been interested in education, and believed it to be an $8 billion market ripe for “digital destruction.”
I don’t know if I’d call it digital destruction. But whether the B2B space or the education space, publishing is going to go mostly digital. Whether a textbook, newspaper, trade journal, or a legal reporter, you’re more likely to be reading it on a tablet than in print in the very near future.