Data Driven Investor: How the Textbook Industry has Finally Been Disrupted and Will Continue to Change

My newest post for Data Driven Investor (again, sort of) is up (which is also on this site). This one goes into the oh-so-interesting textbook industry. And yes, while textbooks aren't that interesting, the rapid disruption this industry faces and the future of it is actually quite interesting.

​First and foremost, the industry is facing some hard economic times. As I note,

Then, in 2008, a mainstream textbook rental market started to emerge. As they note, New entrants such as BookRenter and Chegg were able to rent out new textbooks for less than the price of a used book. Budget-conscious students no longer had to worry about reselling their textbooks at the end of every semester.” (4) Survey data showed that in 2012, only 10 percent of students preferred renting their textbooks. By 2018, it was up to 30 percent.
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This all resulted in some fairly large losses for the major textbook publishers. As Tophat.com points out, “most of the sector’s major players reported substantial declines in sales and revenue for 2016, leading many of them to reorganize operations and lay off staff.” (5) Pearson PLC, which is the largest such education company in the world, had a 15 percent reduction in sales and reported losses of $3 billion that year.

So where do they go from here? Well, read the article and find out!