dmils4

The video actually threw me off. My cursor was right there, very confused for a sec - imo it's not separated enough from the rest of the experience for it to be entirely helpful, felt like more of a distraction. Just my $.02, cool site outside of that one small thing!

I run a price comparison site for textbooks, SlugBooks. There are two simple factors which impact slow adoption of digital books:

1) college bookstores. It's a distribution issue. Students are used to walking into the bookstore to buy something. The bookstore is used to selling them something. Digital books hurt that experience so there's an inherent disadvantage to bookstores promoting digital. This is as big a factor as any.

2) price. Publishers think they've priced digital books fairly, because they use the full retail value as their point of reference. Instead of paying $200 for a full retail copy, students will surely pay $100 for a digital rental, right? They fail to understand that digital books are going to be acquired online, meaning there is a greater chance students purchasing these books will be comparing prices. College bookstores which offer digital as an option even compare that price to their other (often more affordable) options, like buying it used. That $100 digital rental is frequently available for less than $60 on Amazon or sites like it.

It's not a feature problem, it's distribution and really bad pricing.

Until publishers pay attention to these things, digital will never catch on (regardless of how much they innovate technology).

Wrote this case study for Usabilla's blog. Hopefully it provides some design inspiration if you've been thinking of doing a reskin. We had a lot of fun with ours.

Pretty nuts - the former manager of CollegeBookRenter.com, a textbook selling website, is being accused of counterfeit textbooks.

few takeaways (having just gone thru the same experience of launching our first app in July)

1) don't assume that because you're bootstrapping, you "have to charge something for the app". View free/paid as two different marketing channels (that's really all that they are). With free apps - they are ad, in-app purchase and/or lead supported - while paid apps support themselves. There is no right or wrong way to monetize, but by having one of each, you're eligible in both top app chart categories, which helps.

2) you may have benefited from this (or maybe you didn't) - but one thing that surprised me was the market for "apps gone free". We released our app as a free app at first, but once the downloads started to fall off, we figured "what the hell, let's make it paid" after which we rose even higher in the rankings on the paid side than we ever achieved on the free side. Then when paid installs started to fall off, we switched the app back to free, which had a surprising result: it got picked up by all of these "apps gone free" feeds (tons of blogs subscribe to app pricing updates - so it was suddenly eaten up by this niche market of users who download all of the apps that recently became free). Granted - these weren't engaged users, but it padded download stats for a few days. When that happened we experienced our best two free install days ever before normalizing again.

Interesting to see your stats, thanks for sharing.