Comments about ‘Money, money, money: Could e-textbooks save college students from rising costs?’

When a book has very limited circulation, what should be the major cost? I think it should be the payment to the "author". What is an author paid, when a book is commercially printed? $1, $10, $100? Probably much closer to $1 than to $100. So, what is fair to the author and to the student? Why not pay the author his standard fee and then "publish" the book in PDF or other electronic format so that no one else is involved. The author, and his editor, write and verify the "correctness" of the book. The school makes that book available to the student, at cost ($10 or less). Everybody is happy.

If the student needs a "hard copy" of the book, he goes to a printing center and pays to have the book "printed", at about $0.06 per page.

No more $100 books. No more ripping off students. No more holding authors and students hostage by the "printing establishments".

The world has changed. We no longer require printing presses, trees and lots of useless work to print "books".

Think of how much money could be saved in k6-k12. It would solve a lot of other problems too. But watch closely the publishing company lobbyists.

It is a shame these books are so costly, even costing more than some classes themselves. It's more likely greed is behind this because the government is not helping out with education like they used to. Such a shame to see this. The best thing the government can do when it comes to education is to prioritize it in the budget and make it #1 in purpose to support students in school for higher education. The rule would be to enable more people to be knowledgable and skilled in the workforce in the areas of need. We can't all do it alone.

Here is another disadvantage of e-books: in some cases the students will need to refer to the textbook again when they are working in the real world. Once the e-book subscription expires, they're out of luck.

Text books should be free and included with tuition. The U of U's budget is $2.6 Billion. Over 10 years, that's $26 Billion spent by the U of U and with all the Phd's the incoming freshman can't get a free text book? Really.

Open source software providers like Open Office provide free word processing, spreadsheet, and other software comparable to microsoft. Surely, there are enough PH'ds and school districts (14,000)to produce open source free text books.

The so-called "information" in text books is everywhere. It should be organized into free text books and included with tuition.

The problem with the e-textbooks right now is that they cost the same as print books! The online publisher knows they can get the same amount of money as they can for the print books.

Textbook cost has been a scam perpetuated on students forever. When I was in college in the 80s you would buy the book for $30- $100 and the bookstore would buy it back for maybe 12 bucks if you were lucky. Mostly they would say "Oh it's not being used neext semester"

I'm pleased to see the digital alternatives and honestly it's just as easy to set a printed textbook down and go surf your Facebook as it is to not read a digital version.

e-books are a fantastic idea if they don't charge the same amount as textbooks (to make up for the lack of resale value). Controlling costs in higher education should be a priority before we price our kids out of an education (and thereby lose our competitive footing in the world).

@unaffiliated_person: What competitive footing? The US gave that up 20 years ago when we outsourced the high tech jobs to India.

Higher education was made into a bubble just like housing was. Easy access to abundant cheap money in the form of student loans and grants sent prices skyrocketing.

College in the US was turned from education into a trillion dollar profit making industry selling the "buy now, pay later" lifestyle that got the entire country in this mess in the first place. Over 50% of college students are relying at least in part on federally subsidized loans or grands to fund their education. Once DC **finally** starts cutting spending that money is going to disappear.

When it does the college industry will find enrollment rates falling drastically and will either have to reduce prices across the board or shrink majorly... probably both. A lot of the big traditional universities are going to find themselves in hot water facing competition from upstart colleges offering real world skills in two-year programs at a much lower cost.

After all, unless the lettering on your diploma is from an Ivy League school nobody cares where your degree came from.

Some of my professors made their own textbooks at the local Kinko's. It was great! Any time they wanted to update the text they would just sent the shop an updated data file. Surely most college knowledge is not so hard to come by that we need to pay a premium in this digital age.

The real problem is that our society is gradually losing interest in funding education. Pay for better prepared professors and we'll all profit in the long run.

If the traditional institutions don't give up their knowledge monopoly, as they see it, we might just have to set up our own network of free knowledge sources. We could arrange for inexpensive tests to demonstrate what we have learned, and run the old degree hoarders out of business. Kind of like a super Wikipedia or something.

There are plenty of bright students that could learn anything they are exposed to, if only they had the opportunity. We would all benefit by giving it to them.