Princeton to start publishing Kindle-edition textbooks

Amazon's Kindle ebook reader has been doing pretty well as a consumer device, but we've always thought it had amazing potential as a textbook reader -- especially coupled iTunes-style with Amazon's online distribution system. Apparently Princeton University (Jeff Bezos's alma mater) agrees with us, because it's just announced plans to publish Kindle version of its textbooks this fall, joining Yale, Oxford, and Berkeley in supporting the device. It's not clear how many books are due to be published on the device or how content like photographs and full-color diagrams will be handled (what's a bio book without red mitochondria? They're the "powerhouse" of the cell!), but we're certain students will gladly make the tradeoff to reduce their backpack loads just a little bit.

[2Shea @ Jun 28th 2008 1:42AM]

Now they need to charges much much less for textbooks then, as it's already highway robbery what they charge college kids for books.

[waiownsyou @ Jun 28th 2008 2:00AM]

Hell yeah. Each of my textbooks are like the price of a PSP.

WTH NUBZ

[Alvin Brinson @ Jun 29th 2008 12:24AM]

However, if you can afford Princeton, you can certainly drop some change on a Kindle.

[aanidaani @ Jun 30th 2008 8:46AM]

This is a fantastic way to rip us off even more: now instead of paying $120 for a physics book, we pay $80 for a digital one that we can't resell. Yay!

[Sean @ Jun 28th 2008 1:46AM]

Is it still going to be absurdly overpriced?
Man I love the extortion and corruption that is the college textbook industry.
Yay for new editions meaning the same thing as two chapters get switched around.
I bought my last calculus book for $5 online. Completely legit copy.
School store wanted $100 for me to walk out the door with it.

[phanbouy @ Jun 28th 2008 1:52AM]

hi sean i'm just
wondering if you have a habit
of randomly
pressing the return key at arbitrary intervals or if you're
trying really poorly to make a haiku?

[Alan @ Jun 28th 2008 4:16AM]

Hey Phanboy,

I am sure if you look at his comment you'll see
that he broke it up at every sentence.

[Atanas Boev @ Jun 28th 2008 12:20PM]

Hey Alan,

Not true.
On the fourth row he has two sentences.
Maybe the newlines are where he breathes in.

[thedesolate1 @ Jun 28th 2008 1:50AM]

Adobe PDF FTW!

[weg @ Jun 28th 2008 8:38AM]

Companies like Springer already sell textbook chapters as PDF, each chapter for the price of the whole printed book, though.

I want something that works on the Iliad, so I can take notes (I'd love to scribble in my textbooks, but I don't because I deem them to valuable). I hope the Kindle isn't going to kick the Iliad out of the market, being able to annotate books and papers is a killer feature, but as long as there are no reasonably cheap books for that thing, it's doomed to die.

[phanbouy @ Jun 28th 2008 1:50AM]

i liked the kindle pic with the doom graphic bettah

[jbcaro @ Jun 28th 2008 1:54AM]

I for one have always wanted all textbooks on the kindle. Although I am not at the Princeton or Yale level of college, any time a publisher can reduce the load on my back is a good thing. Personally, I wouldn't expect the cost to come down substantially. It would be nice if it did, but I would still purchase if it was the same price.

[squareforceone @ Jun 28th 2008 2:09AM]

I am presently a college student, and I know some foreign researchers quite a bit older and they use a file format called .djvu. I have 500 something pages of the Feynman Lectures on Physics crammed into a file that is only about 8.64 MB, and it has all of the pictures. There are some weird things that come with compressing things into this format--I don't really know much about it--but sheesh, I always get the sense that the Internet has developed so much more efficiently in Asia. Or at least that they have more economical ways of doing things, in terms of bandwidth and space on a hard drive.

[yoshi @ Jun 28th 2008 4:53AM]

.djvu was developed by AT&T quite a while ago. It's far from unknown outside of Asia.

What one chooses to use to compress his work largely depends on how much loss you're willing to put up with. For example, I'm personally pretty happy with the age-old DVD-quality video. I'll upgrade to better equipment when I have no other choice (by that time, it will be a cheap upgrade too). Other people won't settle for less than HD/Blueray (or whatever). Others are happy taking a scratched up VHS tape and compressing the hell out of it.

As for bandwidth, what are you talking about when you say "Asia"? Taiwan? Small island, compact infrastructure. Singapore? Small island, compact infrastructure. Hong Kong? Small island, compact infrastructure. Japan? Small island, compact infrastructure. (Or Islands, as the case may be, but you get the point.) The United States? Big land mass with people spread out everywhere. There are other factors, such as government interference, that certainly contribute.

[bugmenot @ Jun 28th 2008 2:10AM]

I would ditch my textbooks ANY DAY for e-textbooks, that's for sure!
Bring it on! (the only thing is: I'm Down Under. Nothing more needs to be said :(

[Justin F @ Jun 28th 2008 2:44AM]

I'm a bio major at UCI....mitochondria are purple these days! lol.

And we never carry our books around. That'd be absurd. But a price drop would be nice. We have had digital books offered at slightly less, and everyone opts for them. I just bought a neurobiology book for $110, and it wasn't even required for the course. Just goes to show you how we 'smart' kids mindlessly will throw away our money for anything at the bookstore, including kindles and supported textbooks.

Count me in!

[Striker @ Jun 28th 2008 3:21AM]

Viva la Orange County! I am in Dana Point myself.

[johman @ Jun 28th 2008 2:50AM]

when i went to bio course just about te years ago, mitochindria were green.
that´s funny because everybody is talking about green energy today, and my bio textbook already had green "powerhouses" in it. haha

[Taha @ Jun 28th 2008 3:14AM]

when the kindle came out i checked to see if any of my textbooks were available and none were. If they carried the books i needed I wouldnt even care about a discount. I'd buy all the books to save me from the ridiculous weight (especially since colleges seem to love hard cover books for no fucking reason).

[Striker @ Jun 28th 2008 3:23AM]

They are more durable, and it is a way to charge more, dumbass.

[A.C.E.R. @ Jun 28th 2008 4:43AM]

LMAO striker. That shouldn't be funny but it sure as hell was.

[Dave @ Jun 28th 2008 3:23AM]

This is great for all those Princeton kids that can't afford textbooks.

[yoshi @ Jun 28th 2008 4:33AM]

With the exception of textbooks, the price of a book has very little to do with the cost of the paper.

For a new book, a publisher typically gets 35-45% of the list price. Distributors, middlemen, and the bookstore get the rest. The author's cut and the cost of goods comes out of the publisher's pocket. In addition, the publisher is usually responsible for returns of books that didn't sell from bookstores. So the bookstore has very little risk regarding old inventory not selling.

That remaining 55-65% is almost pure profit for the middlemen and the bookstore - mostly the middlemen.

Textbooks are usually different because of the limited print run. Unless you can get about 5,000 to 10,000 books per print run, your cost of goods will be pretty high. Not to mention the size of some of those textbooks.

Textbooks could, theoretically, drop in price a bit because of this, but I wouldn't count on it until I saw proof. The publisher is likely to want the same amount they've always received. However, by going with Amazon, the publisher gets a break from not having to deal with unsold returns (Amazon does this with paper books as well). Not having to deal with returns will save the publisher a nice chunk of change (which they will probably try to pocket) as well as far fewer headaches.

So, after Amazon adds in their cut, I'd expect a $100 paper textbook to drop to maybe $50-60.

[A.C.E.R. @ Jun 28th 2008 4:45AM]

Thanks for explaining that, dumbass.

dumbass is (c) Striker 2008, all rights reversed.

[yoshi @ Jun 28th 2008 4:56AM]

Ah, how cute. School's out for summer and look who's staying up past his bedtime trolling the interweb and looking at porn.

[black @ Jun 28th 2008 5:05AM]

Well the good thing is that the files will be available on BitTorrent soon. Personally I haven't seen any Kindle textbooks here at Berkeley yet, but I just got through spending $300 for Organic Chemistry books.

Oh and mitochondria is red here :p

[Ethan @ Jun 28th 2008 6:54AM]

How about this - Princeton starts publishing rtf files. Then some students might actually get an advantage from it.

[Mitch @ Jun 28th 2008 10:04AM]

@Nilay Patel

Based on what facts do you state that the Kindle is selling pretty well?

The link you provide goes to an Engadget story that talks about the Kindle being in stock. It doesn't mention any sales figures.

As far as I know, Amazon has not released any Kindle sales figures. Something being out of stock doesn't mean it is selling pretty well.

Do you know something we don't?

[Glenn @ Jun 28th 2008 10:46AM]

While on the Kindle subject is there a prog/way that changes the kindle files types to ones that can be read in the sony reader?

[Sim @ Jun 28th 2008 10:41AM]

YEAH! YEAH! YEAH! This is only going to help, it may suck and be expensive now but this is exactly where we need to be going.

[Ernie Oporto @ Jun 28th 2008 2:46PM]

If they were to give you a Kindle and PDF version of the file at the same time, that would be golden.

[Hamidxa @ Jun 28th 2008 2:01PM]

And now for a brief biology joke about a couple and their newborn child...

Wife: She has her fathers eyes
Husband: She has her mothers mitochondria

[Scott Matheson @ Jun 28th 2008 8:08PM]

This is pretty inaccurate from what I can tell... the CSM blog entry cites a Yahoo! Buzz entry that cites Inside Higher Eduction (which got it right), it is Princeton University Press that will be publishing for Kindle (joining Yale and UC Presses). University presses, as a rule, don't publish textbooks. They publish trade books, often nonfiction written by researchers, sometimes on course reading lists. Most university presses operate at a loss, or at break-even with a mission to disseminate scholarship. This mission means they have large catalogs of titles that sell a few copies a year - the perfect target for paper-free distribution.

Textbook publishers are a different, much bigger, profit-driven (often publicly traded) animal. As such, they are much more conservative. I have not seen any "textbooks" in the Kindle store.

(Despite the above comment about being mission-driven, not profit-driven, Princeton University Press is a very highly regarded and successful university press. Many of their titles in the past few years have sold very well.)

If the URL will post, here's a direct link to the original (correct) story:
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/24/kindle

[ANON @ Jun 28th 2008 8:14PM]

"a red mitochondria"

The singular is mitochondrion.

[Danakin @ Jun 30th 2008 8:22AM]

very cool...let's get this standard already...textbooks are too expensive, and, if we could electronically load all of them into one device, that would save my back so much pain!

[m.knopp @ Jun 30th 2008 12:58PM]

Yeah, it will be great until people realize the draconian DRM applied. I would never pay money for a textbook in my major field of study. I still have, and use as reference material textbooks from my early days of undergraduate study. Does anyone actually think that the current DRM riddled Kindle files will still be usable in 15 years?

I wouldn't hold my breath, and I would expect to end up buying the same book at least two or three times over those years. I don't like DRM on my music or moives, but can live with it. I will absolutely not accept DRM on my books, especially vitally important books like textbooks, and those of you that do should think twice about what you are really saving.

[JohnPombrio @ Jul 1st 2008 10:55PM]

There is one HUGE problem here that no one has addressed: TEXTBOOKS DON'T FIT ON THE SCREEN! I have a SONY reader which has the same sized screen. Put a book with heavy pictures, diagrams, drawings, etc on the Reader and forget about being able to read or look at anything. JUST TOO TINY. You can completely cover the screen with your hand. Now take your big textbooks and reduce its page size to that small and make it a dark grey on a light grey background. NO WAY to read the damn thing.
Before textbooks can get onto an e-book (unless they are JUST text), they need to make a e-book reader at least 8.5 by 11 size at the minimum. Then there is the issue of color...