Archive for October 7th, 2008
Time for electronic textbooks?
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008The University of Texas is going to start experimenting with low-cost electronic textbooks that students can download to their computers. Sounds like an excellent idea.
One goal is to lower costs, which are way out of hand in the acedemic world. This is true for textbooks. This is true for academic proceedings. This is true for journals. The market is ripe for a market-jarring 10x cost reduction in academic minded publications.
It sounds like in some cases the electronic books will be offering more than static textual content on par with their paper cousins:
“…students will be able to highlight content, insert written notes and print certain sections of the e-book. Multimedia, such as audio and video clips, will be included in some files.”
[Found via ArsTechnica]