The company followed Habitat with the launch of Inkling 3.0 this summer, which brought its eBooks to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Overall, college students from more than 4,000 schools have purchased Inkling’s titles, which the founder says has started to expose it to a new set of students that had never heard of it before. Inkling has been able to gain particular traction among medical students, as titles from the big publishers are now used in 150 medical schools worldwide and will be in 900 campus bookstores this fall. MacInnis says that the move has finally allowed Inkling to start generating real revenue, as partnerships with publishers like McGraw Hill, Pearson and Wiley have led to growing production of digital e-books.
#INKLING LIBRARY PROFESSIONAL#
In a way it was a reaction to Apple’s release of iBooks 2, but instead of being a platform that allows anyone to create digital textbooks, it focused on professional publishers, giving them an easier way to make their catalogs digital, rather than having to spend millions to develop the technology themselves. In February, Inkling launched Habitat, a cloud-based, cross-platform publishing environment that essentially allows any publisher to create digital-first titles or migrate their existing, paper-based content to digital.
The average price of the titles is about $9.99, with the option to purchase chapters for $0.99 and up.īy the end of the year, MacInnis says, Inkling hopes to have 400 titles published to the library, with some of that content being exclusively created for Inkling, some of it familiar and published already (like “For Dummies”) and some of it augmented for the library - but all of it intending to demonstrate what’s possible now in the digital textbook market - for both indie and established publishers.
#INKLING LIBRARY SERIES#
The content comes from publishers like Frommer’s and O’Reilly and includes some of the “For Dummies” series now owned by Wiley. The eBooks were built from the ground up as a way to showcase the Inkling digital publishing platform, meaning that each copy comes with stuff like advanced search, the ability to sync across iPad, iPhone and the Web, glossary terms, interactive guided tours and slideshows, high-res images and social notes. According to Inkling founder and CEO Matt MacInnis, the library is akin to Amazon for illustrated learning content and will feature 300 titles from categories like Travel & Adventure, Food & Drink, Arts & Photography, Music, etc. Today, Inkling continues that expansion with the release of the “Inkling Library,” an online store that will feature curated digital eBooks from a range of genres and proposes to serve as a one-stop shop where consumers can find hobby and interest-specific learning materials. Initially focused on higher ed, this year Inkling has been expanding its scope, moving into consumer-facing titles and continuing education, along with making its content available on other platforms like the Web. Since its launch in 2009, Inkling has been on a mission to reinvent publishing for the mobile, digital era by building engaging, interactive learning content from the ground up for the iPad.
According to a recent report from the State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), it’s not a matter of if this transition will happen, but when. Not wanting to be outdone by South Korea and others, which mandated the use of digital textbooks by 2015, earlier this year the FCC and the Department of Ed released the Digital Textbook Playbook to help accelerate digital textbook adoption among American schools.
0 kommentar(er)
