Textbooks are an essential, but increasingly expensive part of obtaining a college degree. Digital textbooks are a promising way to lower costs for students. The digital format has the potential to cut production costs, increase options for students, and open up the market to more competition. Digital textbooks are now beginning to gain a more…

For years people have seen scholarly journals shift from paper to electronic versions. Today the e-reader platforms are improving at a rapid rate, prices for devices are plummeting, the e-content is becoming richer and more interactive, and the content publishers are developing capitalistic business models to respond to this disruptive technology.…

With the cost of college said to be escalating at double the rate of inflation, parents and students have voiced frustration, some think unreasonably, about textbook prices. In 2007, higher-education publishers continued to grapple with price resistance to textbooks and competition from the used-book market. This article reports that…

Strong signs are indicating that higher education is finally on the verge of a long-awaited digital shift. Given that experts have been prophesying such a shift for more than forty years, with little if any real change, it's reasonable to approach such a statement with healthy skepticism. Various factors--some cultural, some technological--have…

Faced with the challenge of keeping up with the rapidly changing field of information systems, author and teacher John Gallaugher opted to write an open source textbook with a new online company, Flat World Knowledge (FWK). Gallaugher's open source textbook, "Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology", has an expected…

Higher education's interest in digital content, especially e-books, has gone off the charts. With the rapid acceptance of e-books for pleasure reading, attention has now shifted to e-textbooks and their promise of significant cost savings and cutting-edge features. But getting a good grasp on the fast-moving realm of digital content for higher…

The author publishes and freely distributes three online textbooks. "Introduction to Physical Oceanography" is available as a typeset book in Portable Document Format (PDF) or as web pages. "Our Ocean Planet: Oceanography in the 21st Century" and "Environmental Science in the 21st Century" are both available as web pages. All three books, which…

If the Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCCOER) has its way, expensive textbooks may go the way of typewriters and carbon paper. Ideally, Internet access for all students would allow educators to replace commercially printed textbooks with interactive digital textbooks and personal learning environments. However, until…