I’m sure everyone who went to college has had the experience of having to buy a whole book when their professor only turned out to need a few chapters from it. One of the obvious benefits of digital media is that it is more easily segmented than a printed and bound book; in theory, students ought to be able to buy just the parts they need. That’s the idea behind e-textbook site Bookstep.com. This startup allows students to buy just the portions of books and materials their professors need for their classes. Founder Mike Basaraba tells Publishing Perspectives: ...

From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Attention spans are short. E-readers are plentiful. Digital delivery is fast and convenient. How can university presses turn those facts to their advantage and attract readers who want bite-sized morsels of content? Princeton University Press is about to test one approach with a new, e-only series. Called Princeton Shorts, it debuts November 9. The article explains that Princeton Shorts will not be new material, like Kindle Singles; rather, it will be excerpts only of backlist material from Princeton University Press.  The full books will be available through Kindle and Google Books. Princeton University Press considers this an experiment,...

Steve Jobs has been dead for a few weeks, and so it’s time for everyone to start prognosticating what Jobs really wanted, what he really thought about things, and what he had in mind for the future. Easy to do that when the man isn’t around to speak for himself. Much of this comes from Jobs’s authorized biography, which has been released to newsmedia in advance of its actual publication. Most of it isn’t really on topic for discussion here, but the New York Times mentions that Jobs was planning to hire textbook writers to create digital versions of...

Wired’s Gadget Lab blog reports on the state of digital textbooks, and despite the optimism of some e-textbook manufacturers it isn’t really good. E-textbooks aren’t making much of a dent in the textbook market because most of the time buying and reselling used textbooks is still a better deal. Even though the current generation of students are more dependent on digital technology and mobile devices than ever, most aren’t buying e-textbooks because they are pricier and more heavily restricted than paper books—locked down so students have only limited use of them, and sometimes even expiring after six months....

Here’s some more intriguing e-textbook news from Kno, who recently released a survey showing that the majority of college students would give up sex to avoid carrying heavy textbooks, and who also released an HTML5-based app that allows students to read textbooks through Facebook and the web, Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has an interesting piece looking at some new interactive features in Kno’s e-textbook iPad app. One such feature is a form of 3D modeling that can convert chemical notations showing how atoms bond together into 3D models that can be enlarged and rotated so students can get...

Smartphones can be used for plenty of things other than information retrieval. Case in point: Amazon has released a new iPhone app aimed at college students. A fine-tuned version of its previous iPhone shopping app, Amazon Student will not only allow students to shop for textbooks and other products Amazon carries, but also let them resell items they already have though Amazon’s Trade-In program. Students can use the iPhone’s camera to take pictures of the bar code of the items for a quick listing. Then they can print a shipping label, and Amazon will send them a gift card...

The Kansas City Star is carrying a story by Nicholas Carr warning that e-books may not be as conducive to learning as printed books. Carr points to a pair of studies suggesting that e-books can lead to students paying less attention to the material they read, or being unable to adapt their print reading styles to make efficient use of digital texts. E-books are much more rigid [than print books]. Refreshing text on a screen is a far different, and far less flexible, process than flipping through pages. By necessity, a screen-based, software-powered reading device imposes...

This fall, four school districts in New York will distribute 3G/Wi-Fi Kindles to students in high school English classes as part of an experiment to see whether the ereader is a viable classroom tool. The program, called the 8-Ounce Backpack Project, was funded by a foundation grant and will pay for teacher training and 84 Kindle devices, which will be loaded with reference materials as well as novels. Read the full article at the Syracuse Post-Standard. Via Seattle PI (Photo: John Berry / Syracuse Post-Standard) ...

SFGate took a look at all the ways today's student can purchase access to a textbook—buying the latest print edition, buying used or older editions, and buying or renting digital editions—and found that thanks to high pricing and inflexible rental periods, going digital is only occasionally a good solution: Each textbook will have a unique set of prices for its different versions, so it makes sense to consider e-textbook rental on a case-by-case basis. However, for the time being it appears that e-textbook rental will only save students money when having a new edition of a textbook is important, and when...

Kno, the company that had been designing a two-paned e-textbook tablet reader before deciding to get out of the hardware market and concentrate on software for existing tablets, has released a survey that states that American college students hate lugging books around so much that 73% of them would be willing to give up sex if it let them avoid carrying books. (Gee, I didn’t think a Kindle made you look that nerdy.) I find it a little ironic this study came from Kno, since their proposed (and abandoned) textbook reader would have been as heavy as a laptop,...

Amazon just issued a press release announcing the opening of their Kindle Textbooks store. Titles will be available to rent for periods from 30 days to 360 days, and students can increase the rental period in increments as small as one day, or purchase (license) the book outright at any point. The other compelling feature is that any notes or highlights will remain stored on Amazon's servers under the customer's Kindle account, just like other notes and highlights, so that they'll remain accessible even after the rental expires. Check out www.amazon.com/kindletextbooks for details. By the way, I find it interesting that...

From Inside Higher Ed comes an article about how some university presses are experimenting with extending the concept of textbook rentals to ebooks: "For example, instead of buying a paperback or e-book for $20 at the Stanford University Press website, students and scholars can pay $5 to access an e-book for 14 days, or $10 for 60 days." Other presses offering similar rental programs include the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, and Ohio University. The article says so far, none of the presses are making much money with ebook rentals, but that the real goal...