Apple textbook domination? Not so fast.

FORTUNE -- At yesterday's Apple event in New York City's Guggenheim Museum, senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller was quick to point out how education has been at the core of the company since the beginning. But announcing a revamped iBooks program (as well as the launch of the iBooks Author and iTunes U apps) will do more than just affect how students learn arithmetic. It has the potential to change the math for all of educational publishing. A detail overlooked by most, yesterday's event centered on K-12 books, a category that reported $5.51 billion in net sales in 2010, according to data provided by the Association of American Publishers. Because of the way electronic titles are bundled with other course materials, it's not possible to calculate how heavily e-books weigh into K-12 sales. But by comparison, net revenue for higher education publishing for 2010 was $4.55 billion, with $570 million coming from digital sales, a 70% increase over 2008 during which print saw only a 16% lift. While it would seem safe to assume that the K-12 textbook market experienced a similar digital adoption rate, there is a fundamental difference between the two schooling systems as it applies to book sales: In higher education, students buy material (and computers) for themselves, while at the lower grade levels, publishers sell courseware packages direct to school districts, which also purchase computers for their classrooms.

Source: http://rss.cnn.com/~r/rss/money_technology/~3/Ub1kxuOu2bU/

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