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"We told the publishers, 'We'll go to the agency model, where you set the price, and we get our 30%, and yes, the customer pays a little more, but that's what you want anyway,'" Mr. Jobs was quoted as saying by his biographer, Walter Isaacson. The publishers were then able to impose the same model across the industry, Mr. Jobs told Mr. Isaacson. "They went to Amazon and said, 'You're going to sign an agency contract or we're not going to give you the books,' " Mr. Jobs said. The Justice Department believes that Apple and the publishers acted in concert to raise prices across the industry, and is prepared to sue them for violating federal antitrust laws, the people familiar with the matter said.

But now Ms. Finnegan is working to get the book digitally back in circulation, by collaborating with Unglue.it, a Kickstarter-inspired publishing start-up that opened last month. Oral Literature is featured as one of the site's five inaugural campaigns, which ask users to pledge money toward "ungluing" each previously published work. If the campaign is successful, Oral Literature will be available as a free, legal e-book, downloadable from anywhere in the world. Ungluing "is not really buying the rights, and it's not really buying the license," said Eric Hellman, Unglue.it's founder. "It's compensating the rights-holder in exchange for them releasing something with Creative Commons."

"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.

"The startup's been hit with a lawsuit from Pearson, Cengage, and Macmillan, accusing it of copyright infringement. While Boundless Learning says that it's working with OER content and the OER community to create a free learning platform, the publishers contend that the startup "steals the creative expression of others, willfully and blatantly violating the Plaintiffs' intellectual property rights in several of their highest profile, signature textbooks.""

In this session, we'll briefly describe Indiana University's e-text agreements with five publishers and with Courseload, the provider of the e-text e-reader software. These agreements are resulting in substantial cost savings for students and providing them with new tools for teaching and learning. The IU agreements evolved from two years of pilot testing and in response to substantial input from students, faculty, textbook publishers, and authors. We will also discuss how these agreements can be extended to other institutions through short- and long-term pilot programs, which will allow them to gather valuable data about student and faculty use of e-texts.

"Papertrell is a cloud-based, feature rich, book-app platform built specifically for publishers, authors, content owners or anyone to convert books into stunning, interactive apps that run across multiple devices. "

"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...

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.

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.

"VSU partnered with Flat World Knowledge, a start-up publisher that produces exclusively written e-books with "open" content that can be modified by professors. In a trial with 14 business courses, students would be required to pay $20 and receive a Flat World e-book and digital learning supplements. (The university and a local grant have been covering the cost, so far.)"

In a few slides, he'd spelled out the nine essential components of a university education: admissions, lectures, peer interaction, professor interaction, problem-solving, assignments, exams, deadlines, and certification. While Thrun admired MIT's OpenCourseWare-the university's decade-old initiative to publish online all of its lectures, syllabi, and homework from 2,100 courses-he thought it relied too heavily on videos of actual classroom lectures. That was tapping just one-ninth of the equation, with a bit of course material thrown in as a bonus.

"The university president has expressed interest in the idea of exploring mechanisms for professors to publish textbooks online, and to receive appropriate academic credit for it," Mr. Carey said.

Last month at the Digital Book World conference in New York, Kelly Gallagher, VP, publishing services at R.R. Bowker, revealed that 74% of book buyers have never bought an eBook. To help make the transition smoother, we've put together a list together to demystify eReaders.

In 2009, JISC Collections commenced a new study to explore in more detail the e-textbook landscape in the UK and to work collaboratively with publishers and libraries to identify and pilot four potential e-textbook business models. The results and reports of this study are available to all. In addition to the reports, there are a number of case studies available from the university libraries that participated in the e-textbook trials which make excellent reading.

"The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is pleased to host a gathering of interested parties to identify and discuss solutions to the challenge facing us with etextbooks and their adoption in higher education."

"Jutoh makes it easy to create ebooks in popular formats that you can sell on many ebook sites, including Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iBooks. Create your project in seconds from existing files using the New Project Wizard; or create your book from scratch using the built-in styled text editor. "

"MindTap is well beyond an eBook, a homework solution or digital supplement, a resource center website, a course delivery platform or a Learning Management System. More than 70% of students surveyed said it was unlike anything they have seen before. MindTap is a new personal learning experience that combines all your digital assets - readings, multimedia, activities, and assessments- into a singular learning path to improve student outcomes."

"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!"