Cure for the expense of college textbooks

College textbooks are ridiculously expensive. They are heavy to carry. They are old technology. They use up a lot of trees to print and a lot of energy to transport from printer to student. In the age of Kindle, why can't we have e-versions of them to download, or carry on a CD or flash drive? Why can't we make notes on them electronically?

It's the last part that frightens publishers. A flash drive or CD that contains a textbook could be passed from student to student, and illegal copying would be rampant, especially among college students who are usually starving and wouldn't think twice about passing up the expense of a textbook.

I was complaining to another instructor, Chuck Devange, about the subject of my last blog, and he offered a simple and elegant solution.

Once a textbook has been adopted, the college would charge a fee to every student in the class, and then the student would be allowed to download the text and put it on a CD or flash drive, or just keep it on his/her laptop.

The fee ought to be in the $1 to $35 range. After all, there are no more printing or shipping costs, or buy-back costs. There is no used book market to undercut sales of new texts.

Think of what texts could now contain:

History texts could contain actual news casts from early broadcasting years, or full sized samples of newspapers from whenever they were published. Math texts could contain animated graphs that change based on various parameters that the reader could adjust. Biology texts could contain video that would help identify things under the microscope. Geography texts could contain 360° panoramas of real places. Foreign language texts would, of course, have video dialog by native speakers instead of CD's or DVD's for an extra purchase.

Instructors would have the ability to make their own notes on the text and share them with their students. Texts would be searchable with a 'Find' command. No index would be necessary. Any word in any text could be connected to a dictionary.

Our college operates on quarters, rather than semesters, and we typically use half of a math text in a term. Electronic texts could easily be adjusted in size.

It is time for textbooks and publishers to come into the present. Bound paper is a thing of the past.