Digital Textbooks Move Forward

The Kansas City Star reports that Northwest Missouri State University students start their spring semester classes will be participating in a pilot electronic textbook program which began last semester with four classes and about 200 students. This spring, about 4,000 of the school’s 6,500 students will use electronic textbooks.
Northwest’s plan to eventually eliminate all bound textbooks makes it a leader in the change to digital textbooks. However, they state that they can only go as fast as publishers make the digital copy available and not all students are as comfortable with the electronic textbooks so students who want a traditional textbook could still get one.

Currently the university spends about $800,000 to maintain a student rental inventory of some 50,000 to 80,000 textbooks. A textbook-free campus would save the university about $400,000 a year.

This again raises the question of rental versus purchase and in a WiFi campus or permanently connected environment the need to download. Think of the information and feedback publishers would have available if they could see the text books student usage, annotations and bookmarks. There are many opportunities that digital brings over and above just replicating the physical copy and the challenge to many is to establish a strategy that is capable of evolving and not just following the rest.