MobyLives has reported before about disappointments in pilot programs by Amazon to implement Kindles as e-text readers, but a new report from Alison Damast at Business Week seems definitive — it’s headlined, “E-Book Readers Bomb on College Campuses.”

As the article notes,

Hopes were high last fall when the Amazon Kindle DX was distributed to a group of students at seven universities around the country in a classroom pilot program for the electronic reader. With students able to download class materials and textbooks easily onto the slender 10.2-ounce device, many thought the era of carrying heavy textbooks would soon be over. Just a few months later, their hopes were dashed, as students reported that the Kindle was a poor replacement for a textbook, hard to use in the classroom, and difficult to navigate.

“It’s an amazing device for recreational reading, but it’s not quite ready for prime time in higher education,” says Daniel Turner, associate dean of the masters and executive education programs at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, one of the schools that participated in the pilot.

Now, reports Damast,

It appears unlikely that the Amazon Kindle DX will be making a comeback in most college and graduate school classrooms this fall. Over the past few months, results from the pilot programs have trickled in, with most schools reporting that students were dissatisfied with the device as a classroom tool, and that many students had abandoned the Kindle just a few weeks into the experiment. At some schools, more than half the students surveyed said they wouldn’t recommend the e-reader to friends for use in the classroom, citing the device’s lack of flexibility, slow navigation within readings, and an inadequate file management system. Another problem that loomed over the pilot was the device’s inaccessibility to the blind and the visually impaired, due to a complicated menu navigation screen that makes it hard to access the read-aloud feature. Until Amazon addresses these problems, the Kindle is unlikely to be embraced by most of the higher education community, says Tracy Gray, managing director of the National Center for Technology Innovation in Washington.

A Wall Street Journal report says the college text book rental market is growing fast, and “is drawing investor interest and larger competitors, as start-ups seek to dispense with the need for students to purchase expensive books each semester.”

According to the report, “One player in the market, Bookrenter.com Inc., said today it raised $10 million in Series B financing led by Norwest Venture Partners.” CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia says, “Revenue has grown 300% year over year since inception.”

Maghsoodnia said he believes their advantage lies in their model: “Bookrenter has an advantage because it does not actually hold inventory in warehouses. Rather, Bookrenter partners with other providers and buys the books from partners when a customers rents the book. Bookrenter sometimes buys the books and sometimes consigns them from partners. The partner then delivers the book on behalf of Bookrenter.”

Renting college textbooks has become increasingly popular, with more and more campus bookstore offering the service. Barens & Noble is trying out a pilot program in 25 of their college bookstores.

But, as the Journal points out:

Looming over all of these options is the digital book. While digital books have not taken hold on campus, the fast growth of e-readersk such as those on Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle and Apple Inc.’s iPad is expected to hit the academic market the same way digital downloads are affecting the DVD rental market. The only question is when.

The World Bank has banned British publisher Macmillan UK from selling its books to any Bank-funded educational programs after the company was caught paying bribes to officials in Southern Sudan in return for a textbook contract.

According to a Reuters wire story by Andrew Heavens, Macmillan has admitted it made “‘corrupt payments’ in a bidding process for an education project supported by a World Ban-managed fund in the African region.”

A statement from the Bank said it was “declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts for a period of six years in the wake of the company’s admission of bribery payments …”

“We will not tolerate improper behavior as a company and the fact that we have worked closely with the World Bank to reach this agreement is evidence of that,” said a Macmillan spokesman, apparently seeing the ban as something it was agreeing to. “There is no suggestion that these concerns have affected any of Macmillan’s other principal businesses, and it is the case that they are confined to a limited part of our education business.”

Macmillan made headlines at the end of last month with the announcement of their new DynamicBooks electronic textbook system.  DynamicBooks allows professors to customize Macmillan’s existing digital textbooks by adding chapters and class syllabi, embedding audio and video, and even rewriting passages.  All of the changes and additions to the books are clearly marked within, and so far there hasn’t been much of an outcry about the possibilities of content modification that the system enables.  Of course, the intent of DynamicBooks isn’t to change curricula, but rather to restructure the traditional textbook business model, which has suffered in recent years due to the digital revolution and the proliferation of online used-textbook stores.

But Macmillan and other companies seem, in this case, to be a bit short-sighted.  While the introduction of DynamicBooks might be beneficial for colleges and universities (which set their own curricula), what happens when it is introduced into public school systems, which follow state-mandated curricula?

This past Friday, the Texas Board of Education concluded the most recent battle in an ideological struggle over the nature of the state’s social studies curriculum.  Every decade, curriculum standards of the state are reviewed and voted upon.  The vote is an essential one, because all textbooks that are used in the public education system must be approved by the board in accordance with those standards.  If digital textbooks down the road are to be adopted by the Board of Education, and these textbooks are able to be modified on a school-by-school, teacher-by-teacher basis, their use essentially nullifies the democratic voice of the school board (whether or not you agree with their ideological positions).  This problem is then multiplied across the many states that use a similar curriculum voting system.

Now in Texas last week, the curriculum vote may have lead to an unwanted end, as a large conservative voting bloc enabled the teaching of creationism and the exclusion of many non-white historical figures from history textbooks.  But, as much as I might disagree with the result, I do agree with the process: the decision was arrived at democratically (and now, thank god, the entire state has 30 days on which to comment on the new standards).  It is a participatory process on a grand scale in which parents, teachers, educational professionals and others are invited to participate.  With individual textbooks, teachers and the DynamicBooks model, that process would be removed.

I’m not saying that there is potential for digital adoption by boards of education to happen any time soon.  The costs are too great for public schools, the political barriers too high–for now.  But DynamicBooks is setting something in motion by creating opportunities to amend completed text and “correct” other authors’ work, opportunities for censorship of and insertion of subjective opinion into objective, researched and edited work.  Maybe before changing traditional business models, major publishers should look at the potential their new models will have at changing traditional education models.  And the consequences that could have for the future of our education system, and in turn, our country.

Learning about the Capitol.

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education warns that format wars are heating up among text book publishers: “Major textbook publishers are firing the first shots in a format war over their electronic editions, with several players hoping to control distribution to students and to make used textbooks extinct in a future they see as increasingly digital.”

The Chronicle goes on to report that Macmillian is announcing its entrant into the combat is “an unusual publishing platform for electronic textbooks that it hopes to lure other publishers to use as well (in exchange for a cut of their sales). And to entice faculty members to assign the books, the company will even pay some of them (if the professors enhance the volumes). The system, called DynamicBooks, lets any professor make a customized version of one of the company’s existing titles. That means that chemistry professors can take one of the company’s chemistry textbooks, rewrite some parts, add their own papers or chapters, or embed videos or homework questions they’ve created. Any passage added or changed is clearly labeled as not part of the original book, so students know what is original and what is customized — a concession that was made to textbook authors.”

Professors who enhance the texts can make money if students buy their contributed material. And their enhancements can also be sold to other professors for use in their classrooms as well.

“The effort joins a quickly growing list of souped-up textbook systems aimed at upending the traditional business model in the textbook industry. Last year, McGraw-Hill unveiled its own format for enhanced e-textbooks called Connect. John Wiley & Sons recently started a similar line of books called WileyPlus,” the Chronicle continued.

Publishers contend that they are creating better educational tools — that the new hybrid textbook, which can contain tests, videos and social media features, will enhance the learning experience. A lot of bells and whistles, in other words, in the hopes that students and teachers alike will find e-texts more enticing.

But one by-product of these new e-textbooks would be the eradication of the used textbook market, a market that textbook publishers regard as anathema. Most of the e-texts self-destruct after a semester or  school-year to prevent re-use. Even the original owner will no longer have access to the book they bought. So much for keeping that beloved text from college on your shelf….

Also troublesome is that the various textbook companies are all using different platforms for their ebooks, each with its own quirks and learning curve. The Chronicle reports that, “Professors are telling the companies they want a standard, so they have to learn just one tool that will work for all the courses they teach. That’s why Macmillan says it plans to invite its competitors to place their books in the DynamicBooks system for professors who want to use only that interface.”

No publishers have signed on yet to Macmillian’s program, but it’s early days, and Macmillan’s distribution fee of 18% might put some publishers off the whole idea.

And then there’s the whole little question of kickbacks to the professors for assigning these books that they have enhanced. To avoid the appearance of impropriety, Clancy Marshall, general manager of DynamicBooks, told the Chronicle, “only professors who make significant changes in a book will qualify for payment. The company has devised a list of 10 types of changes that qualify, and professors must do at least six of them for their changes to be considered significant. ‘We don’t want to just be bribing instructors to use this,’ she said.”

Sounds  a little dubious—incentivizing teachers to exploit their ability to assign textbooks to a captive audience. Will the real losers in the textbook format wars be students?

A “groundbreaking” UK study that found “no evidence to suggest that free electronic textbooks harm print sales to students” has been attacked by the CEO of a leading British academic publisher. According to a report from The Bookseller by Liz Bury, Dominic Knight of Palgrave Macmillan, which published two of the 36 titles in the Joint Information Systems Committee’s study of core text ebooks at 127 UK universities, says “When we looked . . . at it, and pegged expected print sales against what we got, it was pretty clear there was some fall off, at least for one of the titles involved.”

The co-author of the report, Ian Rowlands, had said when the results of the study were released Monday that “no correlation between print sales and e-book use measured by download. There is no conclusive evidence that free provision of e-books negatively affected print sales. Print sales of some titles went up, and some went down. There are probably faint signals that publishers may have a softer landing than predicted on textbooks.”

But Knight insists “The e-books sample was very small and the variables very considerable. The picture with print sales is more nuanced when you look at individual books. The key issue is that textbooks are bought by many millions of students. If the JISC model is to buy a single book to network to students, then the library will have to pay quite a lot.”

Meanwhile The Bookseller report also says “the study found that many users ‘grazed’ the core text ebooks, dipping in and out for short periods, rather than reading at length. Mostly the ebooks were read online and not downloaded, and cutting and pasting references or citations was commonplace.”

It’s that time again: Time for the newest edition of the psychiatric profession’s most important texts, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. As Alex Beam explains in his Boston Globe column, it “functions as the instruction booklet for their profession” in that it defines the newest research in what and what isn’t a mental illness.

But while the new one is in the works, Beam says “already the fur is flying.”

Why? It seems the last edition had some questionable “illnesses.” As Beam details, “That 886-page volume, published in 1994, famously included snoring (“Breathing’Related Sleep Disorder’’; DSM code 780.59), smoking (’Nicotine Dependence’’; 305.10), quitting smoking (’Nicotine Withdrawal’’; 292.0), and jet lag among the nation’s mental disorders.”

It was, says Beam, “a naked land grab by a profession threatened with marginalization by biomedical research,” and many in the profession expect the next one to provide more of the same.

The book packager Inkwell Publishing Solutions is apparently out of business. According to Jim Dwyer’s New York Times report from Friday, the company, which specializes in developing textbooks, has closed its offices and turned the lights off. According to the Times, “The phone rings and rings. No one answers.” What’s worse? The company apparently went down owing freelancers hundreds of thousands of dollars—payments that were many months overdue and long said to be in the mail.

Take Taylor Baxter, 28: he’s owed more than $10,000. “I owe the I.R.S. over $4,000,” he told the Times. “My credit card is days from being frozen. I am two months late on rent. I have $100 in cash.” Baxter is one of about 50 freelancers who haven’t been paid.

On April 1, Inkwell’s Patricia Cooke, the company’s president, wrote to freelancers and claimed that the delays were caused by late payments from the textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. It’s a fact—or an excuse—that Cooke apparently intended to remain private. When the Times reached Cooke, she noted that it would be “disgusting” to print her earlier statement about Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

And what about Houghton Mifflin Harcourt—which the Times describes as being “owned by a holding company based in the Cayman Islands” that “floats in oceans of debt”? What’s their side of the story? The Times says “The company did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday and Friday.”

But all it took was one phone call from MobyLives: Josef Blumenfeld, vice president of communications at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, told us that “there’s no truth to the story,” insisting that all Inkwell invoices had been paid in full since June 1. However, as the story notes, InkWell had complained about unpaid invoices from Houghton as early as April 1. Whether late payments contributed to InkWell’s fall remains to be seen.

“There is a revolution under way in the classroom with the Terminator in the vanguard. Arnold Schwarzenegger is throwing textbooks out of schools,” reports Mike Harvey in a Times of London report. He notes that Schwarzenegger — “struggling to plug a £24 billion gap in state funding for the coming year” — visited a school in Los Angeles and said, “Kids are feeling as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons. So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?”

Harvey goes on to ask if electronic textbooks aren’t something that can help the British school system as well.

Peter Wayner, author of more than a dozen books, has a problem: “The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated.” The problem, of course, is how to make a living as a result: “I’m not going to write more books if the revenues will be wiped out by pirates. While authors like Cory Doctorow like to argue that the author’s real enemy is obscurity, there was no real uptick in the sales of my book when these pirated versions appeared.”

In a report for the New York Times Bits blog, Wayner says he first started thinking of “the specter of piracy of my books” when he recently “typed the four words ‘wayner data compression textbook’ into Google. Five of the top 10 links pointed to sites distributing pirated copies. (And now, it’s six.) To add insult to injury, the top 10 doesn’t include any page that actually sells my book, although they do point to several pages at Amazon and other sites that sell newer books by other authors.”