According to the verege, there are two subscription levels, registered students can pay $9.99 per month to access one textbook at a time or $14.99 per month to access the company’s full library (a selection of more than 1,500 e-books). The app also offers many other study tools, including flashcards, annotations, and customizable fonts.
Textbooks are a college expense, and can charge some students hundreds of dollars in costs per semester, and Pearson pays for this service as a money-saving measure. Bird estimates the average cost of a digital textbook “anywhere from $40 or $50 to Over Two Hundred Dollars”, which means that students who need two or more Pearson textbooks per semester will practically save money by purchasing eight months of the most expensive subscription class books.
This comes with some caveats, of course. Students can save money on physical textbooks by buying them used, and they can redeem some of their value by reselling – both advantages not available through a digital form. And subscription platforms can always raise their prices, as we saw platforms from Netflix and Disney Plus to Spotify and Philo in the past year as their user bases grew.
Students will need to make their own calculations based on their study load, but the value of a Pearson Plus subscription obviously goes up with each Pearson book assigned to a student. It’s easy to see how the new model, while potentially saving students some money, can exert some pressure. Easily find professors and departments to list more Pearson books.
This may also be part of the reason why Pearson targets a long-term, loyal user base rather than a huge one. “Instead of renting or buying, and being more focused on transactions, we go from one transaction to the next,” says Bird. “We get insights into their habits.” Over time, they will use a lot of the functionality within the app, and that will lead them and we together to a lifelong career.”
Pearson is not the first publisher to try such a product, and some competitors have run into obstacles. Cengage offers a similar platform, Cengage Unlimited, priced at $69.99 for four months, and has faced lawsuits from authors claiming that the service altered compensation structures and negatively affected royalties, which Bird says Pearson has worked on previously. “How do we handle royalties and compensation, this was all part of the active discussion during the development of this app,” he says.
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