Textbooks

I know this blog promotes reading for fun but I wanted to give my thoughts after reading the Jan 30th Dakota Student article on Tackling Textbook Troubles. I've just returned from the American Library Association Conference where I saw presentations by Nicole Allen, leader of the Make Textbooks affordable campaign, associate professor David Wiley, the "Chief Openness Officer" for Flat World Knowlege and Mark Nelson, "Digital Content Strategist" for the National Association of College Stores.

As I librarian, I was familiar with the "Open Access" movement to allow faculty to retain/negotiate rights for the research they produce. At this talk I learned of a push to create high quality textbooks that may be free to view online and available in print at a nominal cost-say $30 (for accounting and engineering textbooks!). Interestingly, the book store industry rep embraced this concept because bookstores do not make much of a profit from textbooks. Nelson talked about bookstores collaborating with libraries to create digital bookshelves. Someone mentioned that so far students have continued to buy (the very affordable) print versions to own but have easy access to the textbooks electronically while on campus (I wonder if Follet knows about this new strategy--I found on their website a 2004 document dealing with textbook prices).

The library does have some online books right now and we look into buying more but we need to match the right content with the right price and have access that doesn't expire. We haven't found that right mix yet. Today's Futuretense public radio program I like to listen to shows we're not alone in this problem, Why ebooks have yet to take off in a big way (2/3/09 program).

So, maybe someday soon real change will come for student reading, recreational and otherwise.

Kristen