When students at Princeton University, the University of Utah and eight other colleges start combing their school bookstore shelves for fall semester textbooks, they'll find a new alternative to the hard-covered tomes they're used to buying.
Alongside the new and used versions of Dante's Inferno and "Essentials of Psychology" will be little cards offering 33 percent off if students decide to download a digital version of a text instead of buying a hard copy.
That's not a bad deal for a cash-strapped student facing book bills in the hundreds of dollars. But there are trade-offs. The new digital textbook programme imposes strict guidelines on how the books can be used, including locking the downloaded books to a single computer and setting a five-month expiration date, after which the book can't be read.
Bookstore managers at the 10 schools participating in the trial programme say they expect some students to be put off by the restrictions, but say they are eager to provide a digital choice to students who are increasingly computer-centred — and help them save money in the process.
"We don't know yet how people will react," said Virginia France, the marketing director at the Princeton University Store. "It is something that will evolve over time. But it is the first programme like it that involves the stores, so naturally we think that's a good idea."
The new programme is among the most far-reaching moves toward digital publishing made in the academic environment to date, and could prove to be a significant test of the kinds of trade-offs students are willing to make in order to access the conveniences of digital texts.
Indeed, the history of electronic books has shown that readers have found little to love, even when prices are substantially lower. Critics say that most consumers aren't yet willing to read book-length segments of text online and that e-book devices remain too expensive for the mass market.
E-books as a whole remain an infinitesimal...
