Business Chief USA February 2019

LSC COMMUNICATIONS
166
“We found there wasn’t the network infrastructure
to support all this digital delivery. There
was an ongoing request and requirement
for printed material – as the digital curriculum
develops it is supplemented with print,
and the print component has continued to
grow pretty dramatically. We are working
with the most advanced clients and publishers
in that space, at the school and college
level, including the providers of open
educational resource (OER) material such as
California State University’s MERLOT project,
which publish low-cost printed books to
supplement online content,” Shea adds.
OpenStax, a nonprofit edtech initiative based
at Rice University makes textbooks available
in free digital formats and at a low cost in print.
LSC prints a significant number of these
core textbooks, mostly at the freshman and
sophomore level, which sell at a fraction of the
cost of the mainstream equivalents. “Open-
Stax has really changed the economics of
making printed material available to students,”
he explains. All of these initiatives benefit from
LSC’s unrivaled digital print capacity. Even
more importantly though, the very complexity
and immediacy they have brought to the
University Press underlines the need for the
comprehensive service platform the company
FEBRUARY 2019