LuYu, although your ideas are very idealistic, until you figure out an alternative way to make sure people get paid for the work they do, you can’t expect publishing houses to simply do all that work and give it away for nothing.

To make textbooks “free” to students, we’re talking about radical changes in the way books are produced, who produces them, and how that effort is financed. You’re probably talking about having government take over the book production process altogether, essentially telling ed publishing houses their services are no longer required, and building new materials, formats and relationships with all school systems, literally from scratch. That’s not going to be a quick and easy thing to pull off.

As for the study, I think its best conclusion is that every student should have a laptop to view e-books on, in whatever app best suits them.

A bundle of open (Public Domain or Creative Commons licensed) works would allow:

Easy conversion to the device reqirements of whatever the student has on hand (laptops, PDAs, phones, etcetera)
The ability to print all (POD) or some (copy shop) the information the student might desire on paper
Easy and unfettered sharing of excerpts, images, or any other information associated with the book
Larger, more useful, and more detailed images, charts, and maps than would be available on paper
Links to other relevant sources of information
Protect students from monopoly rents commonly charged by copyright holders (thieves who believe in concepts like “intellectual property”)
Allow students to annotate and share annotated versions of texts or even new remixes of the texts to aid others in the uptake of this information (after all, teachers and authors are not the only people with good ideas about how to learn and memorise)
Protect students from the shortcomings of myopic programmers (few programmers have the ability to predict all the requirements of a piece of software they write, and such requirements change over time in response to cultural changes and user needs)
Give students the best of both worlds: paper and plastic

Once again, these students have already paid the schools for an education. The taxpayers have already paid these schools to educate society. Why are students paying extra for commercial books?

Why, indeed, do text books need copyright as an incentive anyway? The incentive to produce text books is clear: without them, teaching is much more difficult. Textbooks, like recipes — which are certainly not subject to copyright — carry their own incentive and do not need an additional monetary one. Books like the Norton Anthologies are uncopyrightable collections of Public Domain works. Why do these textbook publishing houses exist at all?

This is not pleasure reading of strictly fiction. This is academic use, which has greater requirements.

[Editor's note---just to be clear: The above site is the comment writer's, as you'd guess. Looks like an interesting site, though, at first glance.]

It will take a good 20 years for higher-ed to ‘digest’ all these changes. That’s probably enough time for publishers to catch up.