The digital version is 34% more expensive.*4 The annual content cost per student per class comes out to $10.38 per student for a printed textbook and $15.24 for the digital.
#Apple higher ed store full
For large deals publishers often provide a free TE for every 30 student editions purchased – but I’ve handicapped the print by including it at full cost. You also have to factor in the teacher edition – I used $200 for a print version and $49.99 for a digital version (this is frequently the most expensive piece to produce in print because of the low number of units created). When a school buys an Apple iText it costs them $14.99 per student – per year. When a school buys a $60 textbook today they use it for an average of 5-7 years for a per student cost of about $10. The nicest way I can think of to characterize this promise is that it is a follicly challenged prevarication.*3 Apple should know better. If you want the spreadsheet so you can tweak the variables email me at for a copy.Īt the heart of Apple’s messaging is the idea that at $14.99 an iText is significantly less expensive than a $60 textbook. This analysis looks at the economics from a school’s perspective, in the future I’ll address how this new model affects publishers’ business model. I’ve tried to stick to per student per class pricing – this is the most scalable unit of measurement for schools of all sizes.*2 I’ve amortized the various components based on their usual lifespan.
![apple higher ed store apple higher ed store](https://www.targetx.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/apple_blog.png)
The right way to compare the cost of a textbook and an iText is on an annualized basis per student – this provides the fairest apples to apples (ahem) evaluation. The average high school has 752 students, 43 teachers, and a total budget of $7.7 million (data sourced from NCES).*1 There are five components to the cost and we’ll examine each.Īpple is targeting High Schools so this is the baseline we’ll use. THINGS DON’T ADD UP (or they do and it is a lot of money…)
#Apple higher ed store update
Update – A follow on post discussion of reader responses is here.įollow me down into the details where the devil resides…. The press reports I’ve seen have completely missed this because Apple “ hand waved” their way around it. It will cost a school 552% more to implement iPad textbooks than it does to deploy books. All the sweet promises Apple is making are going to slam headfirst into the funding issue. I’ll write about the many positives in future posts.īut there is a worm in this apple. I’ve had a few weeks to play with iBooks Author and iBooks2 and discuss them with colleagues. From a Publisher’s perspective Apple’s iPad textbook initiative is a decent 1.0 release with promise.