Ingram is a publishing services company which will produce, distribute, or sell books for just about everyone in almost every industry or niche, so when they sold off VitalSource last month, it really said something about the future of digital textbooks.

Ingram today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to sell VitalSource Technologies LLC to Francisco Partners, a leading global investment firm that specializes in partnering with technology businesses.

VitalSource® is a leading education technology solutions provider committed to helping partners create, deliver, and distribute affordable and impactful learning experiences worldwide. VitalSource’s products and technologies, including the leading learning platform, Bookshelf, are used by 16 million learners in more than 240 countries.

The move made perfect sense to me; really, the only digital textbook platform which makes sense from a student or school perspective is one where you license the platform rather than the content, and then let the school provide the open source textbooks.

VitalSource was not that.

image by Danny Nicholson via Flickr