News Story

eBook Futures: the publisher’s dilemma

Peter Scott, Tuesday 1 Mar 2011

On the 17/18th February 2011 in Brussels, Belgium, the EU Aspect Project ran a very well attended strategic seminar on ‘Educational Publishing Futures’ as a platform where Ministries of Education, publishers and ICT vendors could discuss the future of educational publishing and digital content for schools.

KMi Director Peter Scott presented our work on ‘eBook open learning vision. The Open University experience’. In this talk, recent OU work was connected with the wider perspective of EU initiatives such as STELLAR, OpenScout and iCoper.

Peter was supported at the event by Apple Inc. who were able to showcase the 277 Open University eBooks that are currently available via the Open University in iTunes U. The dilemma for the Educational publisher is that organizations like the OU and now many more have very powerful publishing tools, like ePub now at their fingertips – presenting some huge new market opportunities (and threats) to the conventional and traditional educational publishing business models.

Exciting times!