There is an enduring conversation in high education regarding the academic publishing funding model. In most colleges and universities, faculty job security is contingent both on effective teaching and a record of scholarly research.

Typically, the record of scholarly research is determined by how many articles are published in peer-reviewed publications. Many peer-reviewed publications are published by for-profit companies such as Reed Elsevier, Springer Science+Business Media, and John Wiley & Sons, even though the content for these journals is provided free of charge and the peer-review process to cull submissions and edit content is done by academics on a volunteer basis. The profit margin for academic publications is quite high and a significant portion of library budgets (not to mention my limited graduate student funds) are dedicated to journal subscriptions.

So, ultimately, content for academic journals is subsidized by the colleges and universities that pay professors’ salaries, and these same institutions constitute the primary market for the resulting publications. In this way knowledge is developed, published and shared within a closed network since the cost of access to academic journals is usually prohibitive unless you are a student or employee of an educational institution.

Open access publishing and entirely online journals are starting to make headway in the academic market, but having just come out of six months of searching for an academic job, I can say pretty conclusively that online journals play a distant second to the more established brick and mortar publications.

Last week, Apple Inc. introduced their latest education initiative with the launch of iBooks textbooks for iPad. Apple’s move into the textbook market is no surprise; they have partnered with textbook giants Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw Hill Education and Pearson to offer interactive K-12 textbooks at prices less than half of traditional books. The launch of iBooks Author, however, did cause me to raise my eyebrows.

iBooks Author is an app that provides templates for authors developing their own iPad textbooks, which can then be sold through iTunes. Like most Apple software, the textbook editor looks to be pretty user friendly. The following video shows the basic iBooks development process:

With this tool, Apple is making some interesting inroads into bypassing the monolithic academic publishing industry that has, until now, faced very little competition. Instead of requiring students to buy $100+ in textbooks for each new class, relying on iBooks requires students to buy a $500+ iPad. Unlike Kindle or Nook e-book formats, which can be read on different devices, Apple iBooks can only be read on Apple products.

The rise of an interactive web has made content production and distribution immeasurably easier. I know of several professors who created course websites that have essentially replaced the class textbook, but it’s incredibly time intensive and there is no financial incentive for the content creator. The iBooks textbook model allows the creator to set a price and the author is compensated, but the design template is restrictive and the end product requires expensive hardware for distribution.

The academic publishing industry is changing, but we have a long way to go before a workable model is developed. What do you think is the future of academic publishing?

Katie Stansberry authors the blog Teaching with Tech. She is the former community manager of ISTE Connects.