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Will the CafeScribe Acquisition Give a Boost to Electronic Textbooks?

By: Linda L Briggs

4/16/2008


CT: What if my school hasn't adopted CafeScribe yet, and I'm a professor who says, "I'd really like to have my students be able to download this textbook electronically instead of buying it?"

Johnson: Start by contacting us. We get many, many book requests every day from professors saying, "I'd like to use this in the classroom." Our main goal right now is just content acquisition. I also have professors come to me and say, "I have my own book. I have my own copyright to it. I want to publish this on CafeScribe." We're working individually with professors to make that available, so they can publish their own materials and essentially work directly with us...

CT: CafeScribe released a figure that a college student uses about three trees per year in textbooks. Numbers like that, and the cost, seem to point to students as an obvious audience for this technology, but that's been said for a while now. What still needs to happen?

Johnson: Well, the sooner the publishers open up all their content, the sooner we'll get a peak there. The biggest thing I've seen more than anything is get this book for me and I'll use it. We get that constantly and it's just getting the publishers move more quickly.

I think that within the next three to four years, you'll see a huge shift in how many textbooks are on a student's backpack. Price is the No. 1 thing for a student. Second to that is, "I am so tired of carrying around a 35-pound backpack."

CT: Where do you see things in a year or so regarding e-books? How quickly is this going to move once it tips?

Johnson: I think it's going to take another year or so before we get all the content, a year to a year and a half. Then, I would think closely after that, you're going to start seeing 20 percent or 30 percent of students [adopting e-textbooks]. It could go faster than that, depending on the content. What we have seen is, one student adopts this and says, "Hey, I just get this for 50 percent off, and look, we can share our notes." That encourages other students.

CT: At one point last fall, you offered scratch-and-sniff stickers with a musty smell to them. Where did that idea come from?

Johnson: We're brainstorming one day. In a survey, we asked students ... what they [would] miss in a normal textbook or book. I think 60 percent of them responded that they missed the smell. We thought, "They like the smell. We'll ship you a scratch and sniff you can stick in your laptops." That's where that came from.

CT: And does it really smell like an old book?

Johnson: It really does.


Linda L. Briggs is a freelance writer based in San Diego, Calif.