Various movements have been taking place towards electronic textbooks. At present, most students bear the burden of paying extravagant prices for their books, often as much as $300 each, almost always at least half that.
It's a big price to pay, despite the fact that in most areas, there is a pretty good used book market, where students can unload their books after they completing their courses and new students can avoid the high prices of new books.
However, in this digital age, the publishers could do a lot better. In the book market for fiction and non-fiction, which has been undergoing a revolution, most books are now made available electronically, especially for e-book readers and tablets at prices far below the traditional prices for paper books. The fact is the preparation and distribution costs are a lot lower and the savings can be passed along to the consumer.
There have also been some calls for open source books, which could be offered for free. However, whether this would work is an open question. Quality is a big issue, and to control for that requires a mechanism to monitor and edit any content. This is the norm for established open source vehicles, such as Wikipedia. It isn't likely that skilled professionals and academics will be willing to devote much time to such efforts, if they were either not paid or not given recognition in their world of academic credits, which at present they would not.
There is no reason why they couldn't still be published in the cloud - online, thereby avoiding even more of the publication costs. But having said that, straight e-publishing along the lines of the rest of the industry is likely the most sustainable and economically viable route for textbook publishing. The educational publishers have been terribly slow to act in this area, and it's time they did. For more on this subject, check out this.
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