Tech Tuesday: E-books on Campus
It's a ritual of every new college semester: professors distribute reading lists, then students flock to the campus book store and online retailers to find the best deal on new and used texts. But as e-books gain in popularity, the days of the dog-eared "used" textbooks may be numbered. We find out how technology is affecting college curricula.
Guests
Related Links
Inkling's Textbooks for iPad
Inking - A textbook case of innovation. from Inkling on Vimeo.
The Chronicle of Higher Education's Jeff Young's Site Suggestions for Textbook Comparison Shopping
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Amazon Student
Amazon's free iPhone app that works by letting a student take a picture of a text book's bar code and then offering pricing options for the book through its site. -
Verba
For each textbook title, Verba displays the bookstore price, Amazon price, Half.com price, rental prices, and other options. Young says about 100 college bookstores across the country have offered this search service to customers, even though it means they may sometimes lose out on business. -
BookSavr.com
This site, started by two Yale University students, also searches across different retailers to offer students easy comparison-price shopping.
Comments
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If you can find one, the "best" and one of the cheapest e-book readers(& tablet)......the HP Touchpad 16G for $99!!! :o
Seriously, Kojo...after 10 years teaching in a medical school, authoring a few textbook chapters I can say: NO MATTER WHAT, many students will just not buy the books. At least with "real" books, you can buy used, but they often won't even do that. For some topics, older editions are fine; Shakespeare is not changing. But scientific knowledge changes *daily*. So this makes the books expensive and with education getting more & more costly, many students are just skipping the books. -a recovering educator
The graphic description on textbook rentals above is not accurate. According to a National Association of College Stores OnCampus Research survey, more than 2,400 of the Association’s more than 3,000 member stores were offering textbook rental programs of some kind as of January 2010. This is up from only 300 or so in the fall of 2009, and the total is expected to grow until almost all of NACS’ 3,000 member stores will be offering textbook rentals by fall of 2011. This recent growth has been sparked by student demand, campus stores wishing to provide more options to students, and governmental encouragement through federal grants.
My college experience (2000-2004) suggests a good future for selling by the chapter. A full-time schedule combined with a job leaves no time to read even a third of any given book. Also, after being ripped off early on, I realized that the need to get the newest edition or get the book at all depended entirely on the professor. If you learn better at lectures and by hands-on problem-solving, you can minimize your losses from this whole raquet under the guise of education.
Currently one publisher owns the book and controls all (new) sales. If the author were to retain the rights, he/she would be able to license it to several publishers who would then have to compete to get the students to buy it from them instead of the other publishers who are also selling it. It seems this would not only spur more creative formatting for the book "product" including various ebook versions, but would introduce price competition as well. Is this feasible?
nice information
regards
Animals Plants Rainforest