Dive Brief:
- Digital publishing platform Skyepack, developed at Purdue, is empowering faculty to rewrite textbooks and offer them to students for as little as $10.
- Purdue faculty get a stipend to write the textbooks and the option of royalties, and the Skyepack team packages their content in a responsive layout that works for all sizes of digital screens.
- The content is sorted into “packs,” which are like chapters but focus on specific content areas and can be expanded in later updates to the textbook, to which students are forever granted access.
Dive Insight:
Skyepack was developed at Purdue University as Jetpack before being spun off as an independent company. Its business model plays into the institutional frustration with steadily rising textbook costs. Faculty often do not like assigning such expensive textbooks and colleges and universities do not like enabling the practice. Institutions have taken steps in recent years to take some of the power away from the traditional textbook industry. Bowdoin College recently turned over its textbook sales to Chegg, expecting major savings for students. And Purdue is among a group of institutions getting similar services from Amazon.