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On IU's etextbook deal w/ 5 publishers

"Students spend an average of $900 a year on textbooks-20 percent of tuition at an average university and half of tuition at a community college. Textbook prices have increased at four times the rate of inflation since 1994 and continue to rise."

"When Georgia's need-based HOPE grant for technical college students stopped helping them pay for textbooks last year, administrators at South Georgia Technical College decided to take matters into their own hands. The college announced three weeks ago that starting this fall, it will provide students with free textbooks for each of their courses -- a program that President Sparky Reeves said he hopes will be paid for by tuition revenue brought in by additional students."

Very cool. Maybe a paradigmatic case.

And we need more college presidents named Sparky.

"Stanford's CodeX, also known as the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and MediaX have been working on a "Print on Demand" system - a new way to lower prices for course materials."

Given that ebooks cannot be loaned, does the shift toward them increase the "digital divide"?

Good, deep question. A few thoughts: -device-specific ebooks certainly are a problem, esp when costs rise -Kindle books can be loaned -American racial minorities tend to make more use of phones (feature) than whites

"Courseload offers an electronic version of any textbook on any computer for one-third the price of a traditional printed textbook."

For the 2010 academic year, 50,000 of Ohio's 70,000 Introductory Psychology students have had a low-cost digital option available for the textbook of their instructor's choice. Developed within a University System of Ohio Project framework in collaboration with five leading publishers of psychology textbooks, the Ohio Digital Bookshelf Project emerged from three years of research and within a social network established among faculty, librarians, technologists, and the accessibility community.