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The 11-year-old online program accounts for just over a quarter of the enrollment at UMass's Isenberg School of Management, yet revenues from the program cover about 40 percent of the school's $25-million annual budget. And that's after UMass Online, the in-house marketing agency, as well as a few other arms of the university have taken their cuts. The business school's experience helps to illustrate the economics of distance education and the way one college with a marketable offering is using online education to help its bottom line.

"I believe it is time for the Sakai community to embark on a proper planning and management process for the Sakai CLE, to take us well into the future. Not one that is based on existing Jira's that are left hanging, not one that is based on just fixing a bunch of bugs and calling that a release, but one that completely realigns the focus of the CLE and brings the product back into the spotlight within the LMS market."

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.

"Logically, e-textbooks should be much cheaper than the print options available to students--but they're not. CT looks at the rationale behind their pricing, and the market factors at play."

"After all we (as a society not libraries) did not get the first sale doctrine out of the goodness of someone's heart, it came from a court case. Maybe we need to stop asking. It wouldn't be the first time."

A good summary of the state of the ebook business and libraries.