Electronic Textbooks
E-books are being widely adopted as alternatives to traditional textbooks. Here you'll find articles detailing new developments in the area of e-book and e-textbook technologies, along with stories about institutions adopting them.
In higher education, faculty awareness of open educational resources — course materials that are freely available for use, reuse, adaptation and sharing — has grown for the fifth straight year, according to a study by Bay View Analytics.
California's National University, a nonprofit institution serving adult learners, educators and veterans, is ramping up its textbook affordability initiative to offer students better pricing as well as expanded purchasing choices for course materials.
A recent student survey on the use of open educational resources at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County garnered positive responses from the majority of respondents, who reported engaging with the low- or zero-cost digital course materials and homework tools.
Rice University's OpenStax has added additional titles from its line of open education resources to its tutoring application, along with new functionality.
California's Saddleback College is up to 15 zero textbook cost (ZTC) pathways. These are full degree or certificate programs that have no textbook-related costs or fees for online materials, though some classes may require students to buy essentials, such as safety goggles or calculators.
A community college in Massachusetts reported that it has doubled the use of free or open educational resources over the last year. Seventy-four courses at Massachusetts Bay Community College have adopted OER as way to make classes more affordable.
Rice University's OpenStax open educational resources initiative has announced plans to grow its library of free textbooks from its current selection of 42 books to nearly 90 titles.
A pilot at the University of Phoenix found that a well-designed interactive textbook can help people stick with their math studies. The university worked with zyBooks from John Wiley & Sons in a two-course undergraduate sequence on quantitative reasoning.
Sales of textbook materials for college and university courses plummeted by $119 million between June 2019 and July 2020. That's a 22 percent drop, according to the Association of American Publishers.
Indiana's Ivy Tech Community College has partnered with Cengage to provide all its students — numbering 90,000 across the state — with textbooks and digital course materials through Cengage Unlimited.
