bigpics said:
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and unlike most people, nearly all students still do read books. they have to to graduate.
I laughed out loud at that. From looking at my student's test scores, you'd never guess that they actually read the textbook. ;)
As an educator, I see two issues with etextbooks in college: Annotation and used book sales.
First, good college students quickly learn to underline/highlight and write margin notes in their books. Even with the most permissive format and good tools (PDF and Acrobat Pro) it's still more cumbersome to mark up and write notes in electronic formats than it is to use a pen on paper. This is why I always print academic journal articles despite searching for and retrieving the article electronically. It's simply easier to write on the paper than it is to muck about with some technology. There are several publishers now that have both paper and e-copies of their books (usually HTML) and most folks I know would rather buy the book, even when the e-copy is cheaper.
Second, used book sales. It's not simply that used books are somewhat profitable to the book store. Used book sales drive the entire textbook industry. Ever wonder why your calculus textbook was in its 12th edition, despite the fact that calc really hasn't changed since Newton? By the 12th ed, they should have the errors fixed, so that's not it. About two or three years after the release of a new edition, used book sales almost completely cannibalize the sale of new books and publishers can't make money from that title any more. Used books probably drive the cost of new books
up because of this. Publishers jack up the price on the book in anticipation of losing sales to the used market in the later years of that edition. This has gotten worse in the past ten years, since the internet facilitates national used book buying and selling by even the smallest campus bookstores.
Publishers would probably
love to see etextbooks take off on college campuses. They could DRM the living hell out of the books, not allow sellbacks, cut out the middlemen and sell direct to students, and no longer feel pressure to publish a new edition from the used book market. Publishers could therefore make a killing with etextbooks, even if they lowered the retail costs of the books somewhat. But, since students are used to paying $100-200 per textbook now, I doubt that publishers would lower the retail price much.
So, in the end, the publishers would increase their profit margins, campus bookstores could very well go out of business, and students would end up with a less usable but similarly priced book that's not updated nearly as often as their paper books were.
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