E-textbooks and the push to reduce textbook costs.
This is posted by Peter Suber on Open Access News
John Borland, Publishers loosen rules on e-textbooks, News.com, August 12, 2005.
Excerpt:
A group of major textbook publishers has agreed to loosen restrictions in an electronic-textbook experiment beginning this month at Princeton University and other schools, following some criticism of expiration dates. The pilot project, which will see textbooks sold in downloadable form at 10 university bookstores this fall, went into operation earlier this week. Under the initial version of the program, the downloads were to be sold for 33 percent off the cost of a new, printed copy, but would only be usable for about five months. On Friday, MBS Textbook Exchange--the textbook wholesaler that is organizing the program--said publishers had agreed to extend the expiration dates for the digital textbooks. The downloads will now last from 12 months to an unlimited time, depending on the publisher.
Comment. For background, see my blog posting from August 9. If the idea is to save students money, or their backs, then students, teachers, and university administrators should know that there are several full-blown open-access textbook initiatives, such as California Open Source Textbook Project, CommonText, the Open Textbook Project, and Wikibooks. There are also hybrid initiatives like BookPower, whose ebooks are only free to developing countries.
2 Comments:
This will have an enormous impact on medical education as well. Those 500 dollar specialty books, atlases are soon going to be dinosaurs. This will be a disruptive technology. The publishers will have to adapt. Perhaps broadband will decrease the costs of medical and other forms of education....Adapt or die! That is what happened to the early hominids, neanderthal man, etc. This is a paralell paradigm shift as well. A new business model!
Absolutely! The California Open Source Textbook program will offer textbooks to K-12 at an affordable but self-sustainable price.
How about medical publishing? Well, it's our goal at MedRounds Publications to offer textbooks at an affordable and self-sustainable price too. In this age of Internet technology, business will have to adapt, or they will perish.
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