The second edition of the molecular biology textbook co-authored by Jennifer Doudna and Michael O’Donnell will likely include virtual experiments and conversations with practicing scientists to help make science come alive for students. Matthew Scott, also a textbook author, is already a fan of one teaching website packed with 2,000 video tutorials on math and science topics. Robert Lue notes that cool interactive features are less important than figuring out how to use interactivity to teach more effectively.

Jennifer Doudna, an HHMI investigator at University of California, Berkeley, and coauthor of the textbook, marveled at how the app transcended the traditional boundaries of a textbook. “When I was in college and learning [molecular biology] for the first time myself, I found the textbook approach very dry,” she says. “It really did not give a sense at all of science being a living, breathing, growing, changing kind of field.”

In the first edition of Molecular Biology, Doudna and her coauthors Michael M. Cox and Michael O’Donnell had set out to humanize their subject matter almost entirely within the confines of the printed page. For instance, they opened each chapter with a first-person vignette from a scientist talking about a moment of discovery.

But Steinberg’s tablet computer demonstration got them dreaming about adding video versions of the vignettes that students could tap into as they read. They imagined 3-D animations and virtual experiments where students could choose their data sets and follow them through to the outcome.

“We have ideas and the ground is definitely shifting quickly,” says O’Donnell, an HHMI investigator at Rockefeller University. “We’re all thinking about it and we’re all very excited.”

		Tossing out the Textbook At some schools, faculty skip the textbook entirely in favor of an electronic educational platform. Read More

So what will college science textbooks look like in five years? A decade? The boundaries have already stretched beyond the physical page to incorporate animations of molecular processes, videos of scientists talking about discoveries, and social networking between researchers and students around the world. Publishers are offering content that teachers can customize as they see fit. However, a flock of unknowns is circling—Will the iPad prevail? Will the cost for developing spectacular apps be more than students are willing to pay?

Jonathan Crowe, an editor in chief at Oxford University Press who works with science authors, predicts the textbook industry will change more in the next few years than it has in the past 50 or 100. And plenty of new and traditional publishers are moving fast to stake a claim to that future.

Still a Small Market

College textbooks are big business. Higher education textbooks sales were $4.58 billion for 2010, an increase of 7.8 percent since 2009, according to U.S. publishers’ net sales revenue released by the Association of American Publishers in February.

Digital textbooks, however, make up roughly 5 percent of the textbook market, says Vikram Savkar, publishing director at Nature Publishing Group (NPG), which will soon launch its second college-level digital initiative. Other numbers bear this out: for John Wiley and Sons, a major publisher of science textbooks for the higher education market, $10 million of its $290 million in higher-education revenue last year came from digital-only sales (titles not packaged with a print textbook)—that’s 3.5 percent of the company’s higher-education revenue.

“Everybody in the market says it’s time to go digital, yet year after year people still spend most of their money on print textbooks,” says Savkar. “I personally believe that’s because there haven’t been digital projects that have come out yet that are really exciting to the market and that are designed to be effective replacements for textbooks.”

A New Entity

Matt MacInnis, CEO of an interactive publishing company called Inkling, says “textbook” is too narrow a term for the new kind of learning content his company is developing. An alumnus of Apple’s international education division, MacInnis envisions traditional print textbooks being replaced by a new generation of media-rich learning platforms.

Inkling, which was born in 2009, takes existing textbooks (and their supplemental online content like animations and self-assessment quizzes), “gently disassembles” them, and then reassembles them for multitouch tablet devices like the iPad. For example, Inkling’s version of Hole’s Human Anatomy and Physiology features 400 interactive “exhibits” embedded in the text, including 3-D animations, anatomical diagrams where students can make the labels disappear and test themselves, and interactive quizzes that give instant feedback. Students can highlight passages with a finger swipe, swap ideas onscreen with friends on blue “sticky notes,” and read handy annotations, in purple, from their teachers.

Doudna: Michael Marsland /Yale University, O’Donnell: Rockefeller University, Scott: Matthew Scott, Lue: Harvard University

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