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[johnslat]

I don't know enough about this to comment on the accuracy of the article below, but perhaps some other posters do.

"Blackboard making ties with all major academic textbook publishers
Posted on July 14, 2011 by sean
In a pre-calculated move, Blackboard has just released news that it is now making interoperability deals with remaining four of the big five of the US HE textbook market to wrap it all up in a single stance of corporate lockin. I can see the business sense in that, they are drawing their wagons close together to withstand the assaults both groups are facing, one on the assault of higher fees for the platform, and the other on the open publishing front. But, as usual, their public justifications are weak or even surprising.The Chronicle reports that Cengage, Macmillan, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons announced that over the next year they will build tighter links between their advanced e-textbook platforms and Bb�s popular CMS. Bb already announced a deal with McGraw-Hill last year. That makes the five dominant players a full hand for Bb.

Look at the interesting coded language. The textbook publishers are now pushing their advanced platforms; they are not simply digitally publishing, they have a service that supports people who purchase their books. This is like Tandberg when I was dealing with them for a cutting edge H.323 project. At one meeting with a senior VP, we were arguing about the cost of the hardware and the licensing. The hardware is very specialised and expensive, and to turn on the extra capability of the hw, we had to purchase two sets of licensing per port of the blade. Finally, the very nice Norwegian looked at me, and said, �Shawn, what you don�t appreciate is that Tandberg is a software company.� Superb movement. Nothing but respect from me for how they constantly were so adroit in that space.

Well, here is an example of that same movement. There is this huge assault on publishers to stop being so greedy now that digital publishing is here. But now they shift out and justify the fee structure by showing that we, the consumer, misunderstood the value proposition. We aren�t paying for content, we are paying for access to advanced platforms of software services.

Jim Behnke, chief learning officer at Pearson, said the deal will help the publishers focus on what they do best without trying to replicate all of the features of a course-management system like Blackboard. He described Blackboard�s course-management system as an �enterprise system� that helps professors do things like access course rosters and send official grades to the registrar. �Those are very important, but they�re not necessarily about the teaching and learning, and that�s our business distinction.�

The teaching and learning are in the publishers� platforms, so you�d better not go and use an open resources or you�ll endanger teaching and learning performance in your institution.

And look at Blackboard. They are crowing about the work to allow for access. I call it federated access, which they could have done, if nothing else, in Shibboleth:

The deals do not turn Blackboard into a bookstore, however. Students must purchase access to the online-textbook systems through traditional retailers such as the college bookstore, said Matthew Small, chief business officer for Blackboard. �This isn�t about a storefront�this is about making these things more interoperable,� he added. �It�s a real challenge for the universities because they have to maintain all of these different passwords� to each textbook provider, he said. �Now 90-plus percent of all of the digital-learning platforms are going to be integrated into Blackboard.�

The technology to do this has been around since 2005. We were speaking with publishers like Blackwell about doing it then, so this is nothing new. Again, it was the publishers who were refusing to open their silos of content, similarly to the music and movie people, because they didn�t want to embrace the new model. Now they are binding it all together with another corporate partner, one who will share their interests in lockdown. And Blackboard is playing along. They themselves are now calling the textbook people learning platforms."


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