eTextbooks: Good Idea?
It’s been a few years since I paid out hundreds of dollars per semester for college textbooks. I can only imagine what the prices must be like today, twenty years later. Another vivid college memory is having to lug a day’s worth of books around campus. Living off campus down a steep hill, we tried to make each trip up to campus worthwhile, so planned for the whole day.
A pilot program being tried at several colleges this fall makes textbooks available in electronic form at a reduced price. At my alma mater (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), incoming freshman are already required to own a laptop computer. There are hot spots blanketing campus, high-speed connections in the dorm rooms, and wired classrooms. The computers are fully integrated into the curriculum, so it makes sense that your textbook would also be available on your laptop. I know if I were a student today, I’d jump at the chance to save a few dollars and have less weight to drag around.
My only reservations have to do with the DRM that will be used with the books. Apparently, each textbook will be tied to a single computer and rights to the text will expire after five months. What happens if something happens to your computer mid-semester (stolen, broken, hard drive crash)? The old standby paper-bound book starts to look pretty attractive when you can’t use the electronic version even on a backup or loaner machine. Long-term value of the book is also an issue when you can’t refer back to it in future semesters. In engineering programs where such basics as physics and chemistry don’t change for decades at a time, a short-term book doesn’t make much sense.
Students are only saving 33% off the hardcover version, which I don’t think makes up for the Draconian DRM methods being proposed. It seems to me a compromise might be to charge something like 25% of the normal price for a semester-long license, and perhaps 80% for an unlocked version. After all, production and distribution costs approach zero for an electronic version, so the cost becomes royalty and pure profit. Granted, college students are among the worst offenders of “shared” music, so casual piracy could be a problem, but there has to be a better way.