Giving e-textbooks the old college try

Tired of paying big bucks for textbooks you'll never open once the class is …

When I was in college a hundred or so years ago, one of the major bummers was buying textbooks. It wasn't so bad for a course that was part of my major, but buying something like Norton's Anthology of American Literature that I knew I would never again touch after the course was over was painful. Sure, there was the promise of selling them used--unless a new edition came out.

A handful of universities in the US are piloting a different approach to textbook sales. Actually, it's textbook rental. Students at 10 colleges and universities, including Louisiana State University, Princeton, and Oregon will have the option of getting their textbooks as DRMed e-books. Priced 33 percent lower than their bound counterparts, the books can be downloaded and are then tied to a single computer. Students will be able to access the books for a five-month period, after which the contents of the book will become inaccessible.

Will it play on campus? One University of Utah sophomore likes the idea:

"For me, it would depend on the class and subject. If it was one that I was constantly reading, I'd buy the book. If it was one where I read just a couple chapters every week, but it was necessary, then I would consider it."

On the other hand, a sampling of students on the Ars IRC server universally panned the idea, citing the DRM and expiration dates. They would rather hunt for a cheap secondhand copy than download a protected e-book.

From the publishers' standpoint, costs of distributing and marketing e-books are much lower than dead-tree models, leaving them with much higher profits even with the 33 percent discount. In addition to lowering their overhead, publishers would also like the e-textbooks to bite into the used-textbook market.

E-books have not caught on with the book-buying public at large, with a relatively miniscule US$3.2 million in e-book sales during 3Q 2004. Personally, I like the feel of a book and the look of the printed page. Besides, I already spend enough time in front of computers as it is. However,  I could see the attraction of a rented e-textbook if the DRM was a less austere and was priced more inexpensively in relation to the bound and printed copy. Not only would it save some money, I could easily take it with me on my laptop. Obviously, if I wanted to keep the book around as a reference, it's not an option. On the other hand, the five-month expiration date could also be a good incentive to get coursework done and avoid incompletes. Right, Hannibal?

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