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Daytona State College to switch to all ebooks
September 3, 2010 | 10:41 am
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By Paul Biba
According to Inside Higher Ed:
Here is how it will work at Daytona State, beginning in January: Instead of having professors tell students what books to buy and then letting them try to find the cheapest option regardless of medium, Daytona State will buy a license from publishers to grant students access to electronic versions of the texts and charge them a “digital materials” fee. The college would require publishers to provide e-books that can be read by multiple types of e-reader, including regular computers; students would have to buy a device if they do not already have one, but the college says even then the new system would save them so much on course materials that they would still be paying 50 to 70 percent less than before (the college also owns 4,000 computers that students can use).
Since Daytona State is essentially guaranteeing the equivalent of one e-book sale per student, per course, per semester — and thus no more used textbook market, a perennial drag for publishers, which only see money on new book sales — the college has been able to negotiate huge discounts from the publishers; Spiwak says the digital materials fee will probably end up being less than $30 per textbook (“very few” courses at Daytona State use more than one, Spiwak says). That is less than half the retail price of many e-textbooks, and about quarter the price of many new print textbooks.
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Comments:
The textbook market is completely broken. This looks like a great approach to fixing it. One concern, I hope there are no time limits on these textbooks. I’ve often had occasion to look back on my college and grad school textbooks and wouldn’t want them to go away after the class was over (not all students sell all of their textbooks the instant they finish the class).
Rob Preece
Publisher
The text book market in my part of the world (Ire and UK) has been a complete con-job for years. Teachers writing new books every couple of years and forcing parents to buy their or their cronies books new each year. New editions appear every year or two for subjects with no curriculum changes or new developments. Many are different only in the cover art and a couple of pages moved hear and there to try to kill second hand sales. All constructed to generate new income for the teacher/writers. I wonder if this same system operates there.
Thankfully I don’t believe our books costs are remotely as crazy as in the US, ttbomk.
As a matter of interest – My 18yo son is now in an expensive private school specialising in high graduating marks. They have no IT usage whatsoever as regards students. No eBooks, no eContent, no email communication. No web communication. Nothing. Thankfully most of the teachers (who are the leading teachings in their subjects in the country) write and distribute their own notes and don’t use textbooks. They responded to me by saying they prefer it this way. They believe they get more control over the student agenda and curriculum.
“The college would require publishers to provide e-books that can be read by multiple types of e-reader, including regular computers” Oh yeah? Good luck with that. Is the college going to provide a list of e-readers that all publishers must be compatible with? There will be a lot of holes in the schedule.
The article states that they are using the same formatting system as University of Phoenix.
If that’s the case then they are username and password-protected PDF files. They cannot be directly read on any e-reader other than a computer.
But here are instructions on converting them to a non-protected PDF that can be read on a Kindle (or Ipad, Nook, Sony, Kobo or what-have-you)
http://renehasp.com/?p=1636
A student using a screen text is not necessarily prevented from using print-outs. What I see (at Iowa) is an increase in excerpt duplex print-out resulting in the worst of both worlds. There is also the role of textbook driven courses. These represent only a small portion of university coursework. Finally it remains to demonstrate in-class screen navigation of given texts.