Trine U. School Requires E-Textbooks for Entire Curriculum

["Chen, Xiaotian" <chen@bumail.bradley.edu>]

Digital text books need to fix a couple Achilles' heel problems 
before they can be popular:

1. The price has to be at paper's 1/3 or less.  Most paper text 
books can be re-sold, at campus bookstore, at online places such 
as Amazon, or even re-sold to school mates.  Buying a used book 
and then selling it after use will re-cover even more original 
cost.  Cost of digital books is not recoverable.  So even at half 
price, digital books are actually more expensive.  I would say 
one third of the paper cost would be a reasonable price for 
digital text books, even though I must say that the prices of 
most text books are extremely unreasonable.

2. Expiration of digital book access.  Sometimes, students need 
to keep the books beyond the expiration date for related classes 
or future tests.

Xiaotian Chen
Bradley University Library


****

From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of B.G. Sloan
Sent: Fri 12/3/2010 6:28 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Trine U. School Requires E-Textbooks for Entire 
Curriculum



"Adoption of digital textbooks has moved at a snail's pace on 
most college campuses. But at Trine University's School of 
Professional Studies, that shift is being jump-started with a new 
collegewide mandate to adopt e-textbooks in all courses by 
January."

See: http://bit.ly/hBe9Qn

Trine University (formerly Tri-state University) is based in
Angola, IN.