Published in the New York Times

While autobiographies and murder mysteries, romance novels and self-help books have enjoyed a smooth transition from print to pixels, the college textbook has met resistance in its digital form....For the e-textbook market, the Pearson Foundation's study represents an optimistic departure from data released in January by the Book Industry Study Group, or B.I.S.G., which concluded that 75 percent of students still prefer print textbooks to digital.

"Those B.I.S.G. statistics are really not surprising," said Matt MacInnis, chief executive of Inkling, a San Francisco startup that has designed an application to help major academic publishers, like McGraw-Hill and Pearson, recreate their higher education textbooks for the iPad. In the process, Inkling has become the front-runner in the tablet-textbook market.

"Up until now, digital textbooks were a flat - no value-added PDF version of the print edition, so you're basically asking students if they prefer an inferior product," MacInnis said. "So it's no surprise students weren't interested."

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