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"Over the next five years, digital textbook sales in the United States will surpass 18% of combined new textbook sales for the Higher Education and Career Education markets. This increase will boost revenues for digital textbooks to more than $1 billion and necessitate a general overhaul of traditional textbook production processes. The growth will also create avenues for new content publishers to enter the textbook market, lead to fundamental shifts in purchasing patterns around learning materials, and expedite the formal adoption of open educational resources to augment premium digital content"

"Textbooks are a thing of the past, says the common wisdom. Well, the common wisdom of the Technorati maybe. The problem with that thinking is that the number one publisher in the world is Pearson, a textbook publisher, who brought in $7.75 billion in 2009. Pearson, as Tim Carmody noted in a January Wired article, owns 50 percent of the Financial Times, as well as the number two trade house: Penguin. The second largest textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, owns Standard and Poor's. To say textbooks are big business is like saying bullets are ouchie."

"A typical college student spends up to $1,000 per year on textbooks, and many students don't buy textbooks at all because they're too expensive. E-textbooks can cost up to 50 percent less than standard textbooks while providing the foundation for integration of multiple learning resources into a single delivery system. E-textbooks and their enhanced interactive learning resources also have the potential to accelerate student learning."

"Dear SUNY Faculty, We would like you to consider being one of the first to produce an Open SUNY Textbook. We invite you to apply by submitting a brief proposal by December 17th to publish your textbook as an open educational resource and print-on-demand title, made possible thanks to a SUNY Innovative Instruction Technology Grant and the support of SUNY Libraries & SUNY Press. If selected, you will receive an award of $3,000 upon the completion of all work and required forms. An additional $1,000 will be paid to you if you decide to include and assess student involvement in the design and development of the textbook.* Although an open textbook is free online, you will be eligible to earn royalties on sales of the print-on-demand edition, if applicable."

"So where's the revolution in the e-textbook market? According to the National Association of College Stores (NACS), digital books currently account for less than 3 percent of textbook sales. NACS expects that percentage to reach 10 to 15 percent by 2012, while researchers at Simba Information predict that e-textbooks will account for more than 11 percent of textbook sales by 2013. But even this relatively swift growth rate represents a trickle compared to the flood of e-book sales on Amazon."

"In 2011 the Temple University Teaching, Learning & Technology Roundtable created The Alternate Textbook Project. The goal of the Project is to encourage faculty experimentation and innovation in finding new, better and less costly ways to deliver learning materials to their students. Through the Project faculty can receive a competitive grant to develop an alternate to the traditional textbook. That could be anything from a customized set of instructional content to an existing open textbook. There is no expectation that faculty will author complete open textbooks."

"Abstract: A self-selected agile team of liaisons conducted a high level scan of e-textbook publishing and recent implementations of e-textbooks at selected institutions to address questions and concerns we anticipate will be raised soon at Brandeis, namely: Are there examples of successful, sustainable implementations of e-textbooks? What is the status of the technology? How well do e-textbooks meet the needs of faculty and students for teaching and learning? What is the nature of the available content and its functionality? Are publishers and vendors offering suitable sales or subscription models?"

Good work, and great to see from a liberal education institution. Maybe they'll rerun the study for 2012?

Neat combination of ebook w/inquiry-based learning.

" In this course the students do not have a textbook; in fact, they are forbidden from using outside sources at any time. Instead, they are given the skeleton of a textbook. It has definitions, statements of theorems, some explanatory text, and some problems. They must prove the theorems, solve the problems, and type their work into the empty textbook. By the end of the semester they have created their own textbook."

Great example of collaborative knowledge creation! It would be interesting to replicate in other disciplines or do a seminar with others taking similar approach.

"Several universities have recently tried a new model for delivering textbooks in hopes of saving students money: requiring purchase of e-textbooks and charging students a materials fee to cover the costs. A recent report on some of those pilot projects, however, shows that many students find the e-textbooks "clumsy" and prefer print."

"Daytona State College, a fifty-three year old former community college, now a state college offering four year degree, has a very seriously embarked upon the task of greatly reducing the cost of higher education via the replacement of traditional textbooks with a number of textbook alternatives, to include e-textbooks. Our faculty and administration are equally as passionate about solving this "student access limiting" issue. Many of the College's students pay more for textbooks than they pay for tuition and fees."

" The American Public University System wants to get more bang for its buck with e-textbooks, so the for-profit college system is enlisting its professors to write and edit digital course materials. Faculty members are submitting proposals for e-textbooks to be used in about half of the institution's general education courses by the end of 2012. And university leaders hope the recently launched APUS ePress will produce many more in-house e-textbooks in the future."

"This isn't the same approach, however, that Apple took to disrupting the music industry. This isn't the equivalent of $.99 download for songs. This is about hiring "great textbook writers," something I don't think Apple ever did for songwriters, other than a few "iTunes Exclusive Releases" perhaps. And it seems as though -- again, just based on this passage from the biography -- that Jobs' frustration with the industry isn't with the industry so much as the bureaucracy that goes into textbook certification and adoption. How would partnering with Pearson, the largest education publisher in the world, disrupt textbook publishing? Color me skeptical."

"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.

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

" Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU) recently decided to take a novel approach to reducing textbook costs for its students by reworking its contracts not with the companies that sell books, but rather those that control the bookstores."

"49 percent of SNHU students either buy their textbooks someplace other than the campus bookstore or do not buy them at all." - wow.

"Key Takeaways This single-class study sought to evaluate technology-enhanced student engagement by comparing the experiences of students using only an e-textbook with the experiences of those using only a standard textbook. Students were surveyed throughout the course, and more than 80 percent of the iPad users reported they "loved" using it and wanted to use it in future courses. Contrary to students' assumptions both before and after iPad use, however, students using the technology did not perform better than those using the standard textbook."

"California State University is running one of the nation's largest pilot studies of e-textbooks, involving thousands of students on five campuses, and one of the biggest findings so far boils down to the cliché the devil is in the details. Whether or not students liked their digital textbooks depended on what rules publishers set on how the digital books could be used."

"Having built, bought and partnered its way into the textbook distribution business, Chegg is launching a long-promised mobile web version today that lets readers easily read and mark up their textbooks. "

"Advocates for open-license textbooks in higher education, while largely unhappy with Apple's new iBooks 2 platform, say the technology behemoth has done a favor for their movement: Apple's pricey, limiting approach to digital textbooks is in stark contrast to the textbook model that aims for low-cost or free college texts."