With most college textbooks running more than $100 — some top $200 — students and teachers alike are looking for ways to get books cheaper. One place to look is on the Internet: E-textbooks can often cost less than half the price of a paperback version.
With most college textbooks running more than $100 — some top $200 — students and teachers alike are looking for ways to get books cheaper. One place to look is on the Internet: E-textbooks can often cost less than half the price of a paperback version.
While it's still early in the development process, traditional publishers and entrepreneurs are entering the e-textbook market. With about four million students a year taking online courses in the United States, it's a potentially huge market to tap. While most courses use "regular" textbooks, e-books will surely increase in popularity.
After three print versions of Decisions for Healthy Living, a college health education textbook I co-author with Buzz Pruitt, professor of Health Education at Texas A&M University, we opted for an e-version. Several things went into our decision:
- We were not pleased with some of our publisher's demands about content (we're not alone here)
- We were not pleased with the marketing done by the publisher (another common complaint)
- Used books, which are very easy to purchase online, return nothing to authors
- We had access to experts in distance learning and computer know-how in putting books online
- It was time for a change and time to experiment
The e-version of Decisions for Healthy Living is used at Texas A&M, University of Maryland, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and some community colleges. Students buy the right to an online version for six months, and each student gets his or her own password to access the book. The book sells to students for $45 and the print version is nearly $100.
Early results are promising. About 400 students a year at Texas A&M have logged on for the book, and we don't hear complaints from them. And from the teacher's viewpoint, the e-book results in a broader course experience. For example, e-links in the book get students directly to other sources of information — the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other popular websites. "Put it all together — lecture, book, instant sources — and the students get everything they need to pass the final," according to one professor.
We have learned that the e-book works best in courses designed for e-learning. At the University of Maryland, for example, about three dozen students take an online health education course in the winter and summer, and most buy the e-book. Because it's a distance learning course, most of the students live off campus, and it's not as convenient for them to borrow a textbook from a roommate or read it in the library. There also is the convenience factor for these students. They tend to be mobile — on the road for work or commuting — and most often have a laptop and therefore their textbook with them. From the author's perspective, this is all good because it prevents — or minimizes — students sharing an e-book. Students taking an in-class course at a Dallas community college, in contrast, did not like the e-version — they wanted everything in print — and eventually the Pruitt-Stein textbook was ultimately dropped.
The initial approach to marketing the book was to contact community colleges where a personal health education course is taught. Four thousand e-mails yielded a dozen responses, but to date no schools have signed on.
We reasoned that if we have an innovative e-book, why not do innovative marketing? Instead of marketing the book, the next plan calls for promoting the online personal health course that is designed specifically to mesh with the book. The rationale for this is that there are dozens of competitive books being marketed, but fewer people are leasing their online courses.
For Buzz and me, this venture is a contemporary take on self-publishing with added expertise. We have a small team of specialists to do the marketing, put the book online with web links and provide passwords. An e-book also makes updates easier. Delete an old table or graph; insert one with the latest data.
While we took the entrepreneurial approach, traditional textbook publishers also are getting into the act. Sites such as atomicdog.com ("we break down books into their basic parts — atomic parts") and chapters.com can get you e-textbooks from a range of publishers. There's a lot of flexibility online, too. For $1.99, chapters.com will give you ... well, a chapter. And McGraw-Hill Education, among others, lets you design a textbook online to your specifications. Select the chapters you want, leave out those that are not germane to your course, and — voila — you have an instant new book.
Another e-textbook operation, CourseSmart.com, is reaching out to the Green Generation. Its marketing materials note that they have 4,700 books with an average costs savings of nearly $60 in addition to saving more than 149,000 trees.
Jane J. Stein, the co-author of Decisions for Healthy Living, is a Washington, D.C.-based health writer and editor, publications management consultant and life member of NASW.
(NASW members can read the rest of the Spring 2009 ScienceWriters by logging into the members area.)
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