A recent thought I’ve had is that we should post the books free on our site, and charge a flat rate per student to any class (University or College) that uses/adopts the book.

Yes, this means you have no choice but to pay for the book if you take the class, but if you cut out print and shipping costs (a small amount really, trust me, but still, significant), and the cut the bookstore gets, and the savings on over printing stock, returns etc. loss of sales to the used book market (all factored in to the sticker price of a printed book), I think the cost will be reasonable – considering the weight savings, and that you get to keep it for forever DRM free, and in many cases you can mark it up etc. (like on an iLiad) that seems like it should be worth it.

Besides, unless a whole bunch of authors, editors, formatters etc. offer to work for free, you’re going to always have to pay something anyway. Plus, there are always royalty costs on images and media in most books.

And why do you have to pay if you take a class and other people can just use it free? Same reason you pay for music at the store, while some people download for free from Torrent sites. People can always get it for free if they want.

The way I see it, the industry has to produce value, and the people who benefit from that value have to pay a reasonable amount in order to keep it coming. 10 pound lumps of static paper for $150 (that you can maybe resell for $75 in a perfect world), compared to a virtually weightless, bookmarkable, mark-upable, interactive exam/review capable digital file for say $80, seems like better value to me.

Anyway, this is where my thinking is at at the moment. Obviously it’s a complex problem or the solution would have been implemented by now.

Finally.. the print function? That’s a passing thing isn’t it? If you have a 30 gram A4 sized device that goes a week to a month between charges and 200 dpi+ res screen, why would you really need to print part of a document from it? (Assuming the document is DRM free so copies can be passed to anyone else who may need to see it). Hmmm… I guess if you want to print a picture for your kids to colour. I can’t think of many other times.

I’d enjoy feedback on my ramblings, the sooner the industry figures out a workable model the better in my view.

Unlike the K-12 sector which is so political, most university and college departments, and professors, are free to pick the textbooks and course materials they will use. To many professors, it is considered interfering in their academic freedom to be told they must use only a particular textbook, especially for upper-level and graduate courses.

And there will be no dearth of high-quality material. From my observation as a graduate student, it seemed like every other professor I knew had written their own textbook and were trying to market it to some textbook publisher — and meeting the same level of success as writers of fiction do (which means most never got to see the light of day.) And of course many professors taught entirely from their notes and shunned textbooks entirely.

For example, when I took an undergraduate chemical engineering thermodynamics class back in the 1970’s (at the U of Minnesota which at the time had the #1 rated chemical engineering program in the country), the class textbook was a mimeographed copy of a finished draft that the course professor wrote. It was excellent — probably the best ever written, and being a sort of “collector” of thermodynamic textbooks (his book was highly influenced by Lewis and Randall’s 1923 classic textbook on thermodynamics), I do have a basis to know. However, the professor had a difficult time getting it published the traditional way (I now see he finally got it published in 2001, 25 years after he finalized the first draft!)

In most cases, a professor doesn’t care about “fortune” (i.e. royalties), but rather that their textbook be recognized as authoritative and used in courses besides their own (”fame”). For younger professors, this is important to help secure tenure.

Understanding these unique dynamics opens up all kinds of possibilities and opportunities, so long as one thinks outside the box of the traditional way things are done.

The print requirement is simply rigging the study your never going to get any sensible economy of low end office or home office printers. And theres only a certain leverage for discounts before it stops making commercial sense to sell ebooks at all.

This leads to the conclusion they want: free ebooks, and while i like free stuff as much as the next guy your not going to dublicate the recources of the commercial industry with a non existing cashflow from at cost printing services, flatworld needs donations of work or money to work, the first being most likely to happens as most textbook authers have a day job as professors somewhere.

And many people find their college textbooks make convenient references long after the courses end. The ability to keep the e-versions should not be restricted.

But I do know that if faculty authors’ interests are not addressed, you’ll have a Kindlized market that doesn’t serve student interests well.