Textbooks & Digital Textbooks

Cengage Launches an e-Textbook Subscription Service

6 December, 2017 // 1 Comment

Thanks to textbook publishers pricing themselves out of the market, textbook sales have about a snowball's chance in Animal Farm of surviving the digital transition. Cengage's solution is to launch [Read More ...]

Barnes & Noble Hates Its Customers, and Wants Them to Suffer

13 September, 2017 // 7 Comments

Some retailers like Amazon try their best to make customers happy, secure in the knowledge that a happy customer is a repeat customer. Then there is Barnes & Noble, a company out to cause [Read More ...]

Why Textbook Publishers Are Running Scared: Survey Shows College Textbook Spending Dropped 17% Since 2007

28 August, 2017 // 9 Comments

When textbook publishers filed copyright infringement suits against third-party sellers (and Follett, even), the motivation was obvious. Just ask anyone: non-fiction sales are down (like O'Reilly [Read More ...]

Jisc Now Offers Digital Textbooks

7 August, 2017 // 2 Comments

Digital library vendor Jisc has found a back door to shove institutional- or site-licensed digital textbooks through. Last week Jisc announced a partnership with Bibliotech, the next doomed digital [Read More ...]

No, Institutional Licensing is Not the Solution to Textbook Prices

18 July, 2017 // 2 Comments

Textbook prices have been rising faster than healthcare for decades. this has inspired the growth in use of open educational resources and even degree programs that don't require paid textbooks. [Read More ...]

“Zero Textbook Cost” Degree Programs Are Rendering Paid Textbooks Obsolete

10 July, 2017 // 10 Comments

When O'Reilly announced a couple weeks ago that they were closing their ebookstore, they explained that they were simply responding to the existing trend of declining nonfiction sales. They're not [Read More ...]

Textbook Publishers Now Fight Piracy With Seals of Approval

7 June, 2017 // 2 Comments

Publishers have been raising textbook prices for so many decades and have driven the price of textbooks so high that they have created a profitable opportunity for counterfeiters. There's serious [Read More ...]

Site Licenses, Er, Inclusive Access, Will Save Textbook Publishing

28 March, 2017 // 3 Comments

If you wait long enough, any idea, no matter how old, will become new again. Joseph Esposito proved that point with what he calls "inclusive access": I have been involved with a number of projects [Read More ...]

Book Cycle Connects Students Buying and Selling Textbooks

27 March, 2017 // 0 Comments

When I was in college I usually bought my textbooks online on sites like half.com and then sold them back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. This combined the best buying price with the [Read More ...]

Textbook Publishers File Suit Against Amazon Marketplace Sellers for Alleged Piracy

24 January, 2017 // 6 Comments

Cengage, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson have started a new round of lawsuits against textbook sellers. The Financial Times reports that this time around the publishers are targeting defendants who sell [Read More ...]

Free and Open eBooks Won’t Help Those on the Wrong Side of the Digital Divide

27 March, 2016 // 10 Comments

The Washington Post reminded us on Friday that the recently announced federal Open eBooks program could fail to reach those who need it the most. While this program enables educators and librarians [Read More ...]

McGraw-Hill Pulps College Textbook Over Disputed Historical Maps of Israel

20 March, 2016 // 4 Comments

Following protests from activists, textbook publisher McGraw-Hill announced earlier this month that it was withdrawing and planned to destroy a political science textbook, Global Politics: Engaging [Read More ...]

B&N Ed Retires Its Digital Textbook Platform, Replaces It With VitalSource

8 March, 2016 // 9 Comments

Following two years of torturing students with a mostly non-functional platform, B&N Education announced on Tuesday that it was throwing in the towel. The company announced in its quarterly [Read More ...]

Students Say Textbooks are too Expensive – Could an Open Access Model be the Answer?

2 March, 2016 // 1 Comment

For university students, textbooks have been both a saviour and a bane. Having most of the essential readings in a single volume enables students to access resources easily. Despite mostly being used [Read More ...]

Student Sold Drugs to Pay for College Textbooks, Police Say

26 February, 2016 // 4 Comments

With the cost of college textbooks having grown faster than inflation, housing, or healthcare, students are struggling to pay this toll on the road to a better life. Some are getting second jobs, [Read More ...]

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