The rising cost of college textbooks has long been a burden for students, often motivating them to seek creative ways to get around this expense. Though digital textbooks—with their ability to provide cheaper, easier, and better access to content—have been around for years, the use of digital textbooks for academic purposes is still not widespread.

We are now in an era of great progress for digital textbooks and digital learning experiences, collectively referred to here as e-texts. Because costs are the most salient issue, new approaches are needed that work on the root causes of textbook prices for students. Early 2012 began with three promising developments:

First, federal and state governments—along with private philanthropy—are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in freely available open educational resources (OER). These resources are being targeted at required, high-enrollment courses where they can have broad impact for all types of institutions.
Second, Apple and other firms are bringing forth new technologies and business models in a bid to transform the textbook industry.
Third, some institutions are using their experiences from volume software buying to change the pricing terms for e-texts in a sustainable win-win way for students, authors, and publishers.

This case study focuses on the third approach as it went from pilot study to full implementation at Indiana University (IU) and is now in a trial phase at five peer institutions.

Keywords

case study · digital textbooks · e-readers · research · technology · textbooks