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.
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.
Barnes & Noble Education, which recently announced it was spinning off into a separate company from Barnes & Noble booksellers, has expanded dealings with VitalSource, which distributes digital textbooks.
Cengage has announced the launch of Cengage Unlimited eTextbooks, a new subscription option that gives students access to 14,000-plus e-textbooks, study guides, test prep and other resources for $69.99 a semester.
For the fifth year running, the University of Kentucky Libraries has issued grants to faculty to develop open educational resources for their courses, as a replacement for the commercial textbooks they traditionally use.
An $36,000 open educational resources initiative at HACC, a community college in central Pennsylvania, is expected to benefit 2,300 students in the first semester.