An industry study suggests the release of free e-textbooks won’t hurt academic publishing. Academic publisher counters with “Whoa whoa whoa! Hang on a minute there. What’d he say?”

The study, the first of its kind, tracked students’ use of 36 core text e-books at 127 UK universities from November 2007 to December 2008. Nielsen Bookscan figures showed that sales of print editions of the same titles fell 18.7% between 2006 and 2007, the year before the project, and by 13.7% during the year of the project.

Ian Rowlands, co-author of the report, said at its presentation this week (15th September), that there was “no correlation between print sales and e-book use measured by download. There is no conclusive evidence that free provision of e-books negatively affected print sales. Print sales of some titles went up, and some went down. There are probably faint signals that publishers may have a softer landing than predicted on textbooks.”