Sooner or
later, any discussion about making course materials more affordable comes
around to this question: Why not publish all textbooks in digital format and
make them available through the campus library?
That always
seems like the perfect solution to people who aren’t actually involved in
creating, acquiring, or using textbooks. For college students and researchers,
digital materials via the library represent a mixed bag. The campus newspaper
at the University of Virginia-Wise aptly highlighted some of those plusses and
minuses.
On the up
side, through database subscriptions, libraries can provide access to digital
materials that they wouldn’t be able to acquire in print. Conversely, the Highland Cavalier noted, some older
databases are stored on CD-ROMs, which makes them inaccessible to users of new
computers that don’t have a CD slot.
Unlike
print copies, libraries don’t own all of the digital works in their catalogs.
Access is lost when the subscription lapses or if a publisher terminates a
title. In any case, many textbooks don’t tap into the extra functionality
offered by digital technologies because they were created specifically for
print consumption.
“Most
textbook authors do not have the expertise to create this kind of [digital] content,”
a mathematics professor and textbook author told the Highland Cavalier article. “As long as a book exists in both
digital and paper form, there is a desire to keep the two versions similar.”
