Last January, an e-textbook pilot program was launched on five university
campuses aimed at providing each with ways to access digital course materials
and negotiate volume pricing deals designed to reduce costs to students and pay
authors and publishers fairly. That program is now being expanded to at least 25 additional schools for the fall 2012
semester.
Through the pilot, each institution subsidizes the cost
of the digital course materials, which are provided to students at no cost,
with a print-on-demand version available for a $28 fee. The participating
courses use McGraw-Hill Education e-books and digital learning materials, along
with the Courseload reader and annotation software.
The program has also, in some cases, excluded the
college store from the textbook equation.
“When students don’t need to shop at our stores for
their books, they certainly don’t need us for school supplies and other items,”
wrote Jon Kates, executive director of the University of Virginia Bookstores
and Cavalier Computers, in the For What It’s Worth column in the March/April 2012
edition of The College Store magazine.
UVA was one of the first schools to take part in the
pilot and will continue to look at the program this fall, so Kates has had a
firsthand look at the program. He’s also being proactive and listed in the
column a variety of ways his store is working to remain relevant on campus.
“This program/model is really about institutional
licensing,” said Mark Nelson, chief information officer of the NACS and vice
president of NACS Media Solutions. “There are a lot of challenges and shortcomings of institutional
licensing models, but unless stores understand those better, it will be
difficult for the industry to speak with sufficient credibility on the
topic. Stores should work to get involved.”
