Bookstores at 10 colleges across the country will begin selling access to digital textbooks this month in what promoters say is the first large-scale effort to make electronic textbooks available through campus bookstores. The 10 bookstores, which will continue to market traditional hard-copy books, are taking part in a pilot program coordinated with five academic publishers and a wholesale distributor of textbooks [MBS Textbook Exchange Inc. of Columbia, Missouri]. If it is successful, the two- to three-week pilot program will be gradually expanded to all college bookstores, beginning in the middle of September....Until now, students and professors who have wanted electronic textbooks have usually had to buy them from individual publishers or online booksellers....All 10 of the bookstores will sell electronic textbooks for 33 percent less than hard-copy versions, said Jeffrey S. Cohen, the advertising and promotions manager at MBS. A student can print [parts of] the e-book, highlight passages, mark the book with notes, search for keywords, and listen to an audio version of the book. But the textbooks will have features that some students may dislike. Each book will be locked into the computer it is downloaded with, to prevent the student from copying and distributing it. The entire textbook cannot be printed at one time. After a student downloads a copy of a book, he or she will have access to it for only five months. And unlike a hard-copy textbook, the e-textbook cannot be returned or resold.
Comment. Why would teachers or students put up with a non-returnable, non-migratable ebook that expires in five months? Why would teachers or students acquiesce in the impossibility of using course books for lifelong learning? I'd be ashamed to assign such a book and furious to be assigned one. The question is not whether the 33% price discount really compensates users for an inferior product. The question is why universities would accept a system in which less affluent students were steered toward an inferior product.
Update (August 10). There is now a Slashdot thread on these expiring ebooks.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/09/2005 10:10:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
