Yun Xie at Ars Technica interviews Vikram Savkar, who is the Senior Vice President and Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group. According to Savkar, there is large demand for digital textbooks (and rightfully so since it’s a multi-billion dollar market profiting on material that, on average, costs a single student $700 per semester while a digital book should costs far less):

Ars: How will you introduce digital textbooks to university professors and instructors? They’re the ones who will ultimately choose textbooks for classes.

Savkar: California State University is the first to adopt the interactive textbook, so they’ve helped spread the news. We only announced our plan for the textbook about a month ago, and 800 faculty members from colleges signed up the first day to get a demo.

[…]

Ars: Would a student be able to read these interactive textbooks on laptops, iPads, Android phones, and other devices?

Savkar: Our textbooks are born digital, which means we created it for what digital can do. As I said before, we didn’t write a regular textbook, make PDFs, and put it online. Our textbooks will be available for iPad, smartphones, Androids, and other devices. These textbooks are born accessible.

Hatip: Shawn Blanc.