Chegg, which is in the midst of a dramatic change in their business model by moving from textbook rentals to digital student services, got slammed last week in the stock market. After reporting mixed results of better-than-expected earnings yet worse-than-expected revenues, their stock price lost 35% in one day (Feb 22). But this is not a story about Chegg or stock prices. What I find fascinating is an explanation that Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig provided about e-textbooks in his discussion with analysts.
Far too often people assume that digital equals low costs, even for textbooks. Then we get reports and surveys looking at digital textbooks as a method to “save money”, where it is almost assumed that digital textbooks do save money; it’s just a question of whether faculty take this fact into consideration. Or stock market analysts make the same assumption, which was the topic of Rosenweig’s discussion on Mad Money. In this conversation, as described at Seeking Alpha, Rosenweig made a very interesting observation.
Another misunderstanding is how e-textbooks affect Chegg’s revenue. Chegg has historically recognized 100% of the revenue from e-textbook sales. Interestingly, Rosensweig claims that e-textbooks used to be growing at 60% a year but have since slowed to 0%. In his Mad Money interview, Rosensweig explained that this decrease does not actually stem from volume, rather it is due to an unforeseen imbalance in the price of textbooks.
Students are choosing to rent textbooks in print rather than e-textbooks because the former are far cheaper. Rosensweig exemplifies this with Chegg’s most popular textbook, Campbell’s Biology. The price to rent this book in print is $20, compared to $107 for the e-book version. Who would purchase an e-book when he or she could rent the paper version for one-fifth the price?