E-Textbooks - The Time is Now
by Gerald Trites

E-readers have been on the market for a while now and have been slowly growing in popularity. The biggest thing holding them back from a runaway market has been price. At $400 plus, they can't compete with traditional paperbacks. However, in the college textbook market, the situation is very different. University students have been paying prices in the range of $100 - $150 for traditional hard cover textbooks for years. Multiply that by five courses and two semesters and you have a lot of money.

Admittedly, the traditional textbooks are expensive to produce, but the cost is simply more than some students can bear. So they often try to go without, or share their books. This hurts their education, because you cannot become educated without reading, even in this digital age.

E-Book readers have the potential to change all that. There are different ways to get readers into the hands of the students without bankrupting them - through university bookstores, renting programs and used markets. Also, the price of the readers, like all new technologies, will be coming down over the next few years.

The textbook publishers need to give some serious consideration as to how they will proceed with this area. One thing they should not do is to each adopt their own unique protocol for the books. They need to be compatible across publishers. Students always have to purchase books from different publishers, and can't be expected to acquire six or seven different readers. So there needs to be standardization.

Also, the University Bookstores need to be empowered to sell the content. Not just for convenience, but for support.

In addition, the readers need to be compatible with other major readers, such as the Kindle, so the students can access other readings when they wish.

Use of e-readers by students could bring on a new wave of reading among young people. This is critical to education. A win-win-win for the publishers, the students and their professors. For an article on this emerging world of readers, see this article in Computerworld.