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Bookstores know their customer needs are changing and so do we! We started selling our All Access Pass (AAP) in the fall of 2011. Since then we've got a lot of positive feedback from students for the ease of use and instant access meeting their demands for multiple, affordable choices they can access anytime, anywhere, on any device . We now want to bring our bookstore partners into the fold by allowing them to sell All Access Pass redemption codes in their store. The All Access Pass helps bookstores stay competitive, better serve customers, and be "paper-lite."

Online, on demand access to one textbook (~$19/month) costs more than online, on demand access to every major movie, TV show, and song produced in the US in recent memory ($7.99 + $9.99 = $17.98/month). Really. One textbook costs more than the entire output of the film, television, and music industries combined.

The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) has released a fact sheet for proposed national legislation to enact a key recommendation of the Postsecondary Accessible Instructional Materials (AIM) Commission report released over a year ago.

"The project is designed to help CSU campuses evaluate, select, and implement eTextbook products that are as accessible as possible for students, staff, and faculty. Emphasis will be placed on developing and disseminating authoritative guidance, information, and resources (e.g. templates, evaluations) so that campuses can successfully tackle the rapidly-growing accessibility challenges associated with eTextbooks. "

"STEPP was launched by the Alternative Media Access Center, in partnership with CourseSmart and the AccessText Network, through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (DoEd), Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education (FIPSE). This program is designed to meet the textbook rental needs of any postsecondary student and aims to help improve low-cost access to higher education textbooks for all students, including those with print-related disabilities. "

The partnership will expand the reach of the McGraw-Hill Campus service, which was first rolled out last July as a means of offering universal, single sign-on access to McGraw-Hill offerings to students and educators from within a school's existing LMS at no cost. With the service, the entire library of McGraw-Hill resources can be accessed with the service with a single click for browsing of test banks, e-books, PowerPoint slides and other offerings.

"the best chance to make an immediate and meaningful impact on the price of textbooks is to facilitate the merging of traditional and free content, allowing instructors to include exactly what is necessary, and freeing students from the rigid and expensive traditional offerings from academic publishers. In this model, "book" costs are lowered regardless of output format. If we are cognizant of ways of merging different types of content in order to get the biggest academic bang for the buck, we must also be mindful of methods to access this content; to break it apart, to "disaggregate" it from the traditional bounds of textbooks and to present it to students in an effective manner."

Warning: This is a vendor perspective...

"Higher education is facing a variety of conflicting challenges. National and state competitiveness depend on a citizenry with postsecondary education. Large segments of the population traditionally have not had equal access to higher education, and this is particularly true for minorities and the economically disadvantaged, two groups that also suffer disproportionally from another of higher education's challenges-students coming to higher education without adequate preparation. This bulletin describes an analytics system that Bowie State University (BSU) has implemented and is enhancing in order to improve the retention and success of at-risk students. While BSU has a substantial population of such students, the approaches taken are broadly applicable since many institutions have students in this category."

"In that model, the institution negotiates a deep discount off the list price of the textbook in order to have access to an e-text edition. In return for the discount, the university guarantees that every single student in the course will buy the e-text, which is charged like a lab fee. This is a definite change from the current textbook model, in which each student is personally responsible for showing up to class armed with the textbook, either in printed or digital form."

Courseload's seamlessly integrated platform delivers course materials through any web-enabled device (computers, laptops, iPads and Android devices, smart-phones, etc.) allowing all course material to be located in a single place. With digital tools that enable search, highlighting, annotating, and creating links to online content, the technology is easy-to-access and simple to use. And, it costs one-third the price of traditional textbooks - the same textbooks sourced from the same publishers that you use today.

Carl says that we should familiarize ourselves with Courseload, the digital textbook Indiana uses.

"Today we're please to announce that Google Docs has been integrated into Edmodo. This highly requested feature allows you to sync your Google Docs with your Edmodo Library so you can easily access and share your Google Docs with your Edmodo groups."

For millions of students worldwide, free, open courseware provides a window, if not a front-row seat, to top university classes. The formats are as varied as the people who tune in. Some consist mainly of lectures recorded on iTunes, while other courses seek to replicate a classroom experience by offering study groups, computer-graded tests, and weekly assignments. And while you might get a badge or certificate showing you mastered the material, you generally won't get direct interaction with the professor, who may have recorded the lectures a few years ago. Here is a look at five introductory economics classes: four through open courseware and one in a traditional classroom.

"several of the Kaleidoscope schools started using the rSmart Academic LMS, built on the Sakai open academic environment, which allows faculty to pull Kaleidoscope modules into their courses and add localizations. It also allows users to access the reservoir of openly licensed, shared content used in the Kaleidoscope courses. "This is the only LMS designed for the era of open sharing of content and a collaborative approach to curriculum design, so it could not be a more perfect match," says Thanos. "It allows for social connections and you can bring your academic content into your profile." "

"Textbooks on ScienceDirect offer today's libraries an exciting opportunity to provide new and highly valuable service to their patrons. Faculty can finally assign a textbook and/or various text/references and provide all students with easy access, giving them equal chance at succeeding because they have the assigned and recommended course content with no financial pressure to find or buy!"

"Readium, a project of the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) and supporters, is an open source reference system and rendering engine for EPUB publications. EPUB is the industry-standard open format for eBooks and digital publications. The latest version, EPUB 3, is based on Web Standard technologies such as HTML5, CSS, JavaScript, SVG, and the DOM. The overall aim of the Readium project is to ensure that open source software for handling EPUB 3 publications is readily available, to accelerate adoption of EPUB 3 as the universal, accessible, global digital publishing format. Readium is built on WebKit , the embeddable open source Web content engine."

An open source rendering app to promote epub as an ebook standard. Works as a Google Chrome extension.

In this project, McGraw-Hill will provide e-books and access to software, such as McGraw-Hill's adaptive learning system, LearnSmart, and the university will pay a "significantly discounted flat fee" for the materials. In addition, Western Governors will also pay the company a premium for each student who uses the materials and receives a B or better grade in the course.

Canvas Instructor Resources The link above will take you into a public Canvas course with access to online documentation and video tutorials maintained by Instructure Canvas and their partner institutions.

if FWK (or other organizations) can find sustainability while distributing free digital textbooks, the textbook market could be dramatically altered. Because it is so hard to compete with "free," textbook prices would likely come down and eventually become only a small part of the cost of higher education. The potential for the disruption of the textbook publishing industry, as well as the potential savings to students, is enormous if one or more organizations can create a sustainable business model. Whether this can be done remains to be seen.