Electronic textbooks have big potential

Article Excerpt

MCGRAW-HILL COMPANIES LTD. $32 (New York symbol MHP; Conservative Growth Portfolio, Consumer sector; Shares outstanding: 314.8 million; Market cap: $10.1 billion; Price-to-sales ratio: 1.6; WSSF Rating: Average) will make over 100 of its college textbooks available to users of the Kindle and Kindle DX electronic-book readers sold by online bookseller Amazon.com. That’s on top of the over 3,000 McGraw-Hill business, medical and technical titles that Amazon now sells through its Kindle store. This could become a significant market for McGraw-Hill. Students will probably prefer to carry a Kindle, which can hold the contents of hundreds of textbooks, instead of regular books. As well, e-books are cheaper to publish than textbooks. This would increase McGraw-Hill’s profit margins. McGraw-Hill is a buy. buy…