Electronic Textbooks
Key to Affordability?

Textbook prices are out of control. Are electronic textbooks the answer?

Refer a friend, get 10% off your next order Single eTextbook Chapters as low as $1.99 Electronic Textbooks are 50% off the print price

Kind of. Sometimes. Could be. Here's the lowdown...

We can agree that textbook prices are insane. We can also agree that textbook publishers like them that way! And we can certainly understand why they'd be resisting the electronic revolution, because it has the potential of driving their prices down to zero.

They can see what's happened in the music industry. Sure, recording artists can still make money by going out on tour, but the author of Introductory Calculus? He's not filling up any stadiums.

So here's what's happening. Some textbook publishers are cautiously making their books available as e-textbooks. The prices are still somewhat outrageous, considering that it costs nothing to manufacture an e-text. And the publishers are very cautious to put enough electronic restraints on distribution that their books don't end up being passed around like the latest R&B hit.

The result? If you can find course material that's been released as an electronic textbook, you can save a heap of money. You won't save as much money as you wish you could have, but you can definitely live a little more comfortably with what you save.

E-textbooks are a new field

Things are changing fast. More and more books will come available. But right now (I'm writing this in July, 2009), the company I recommend is iChapters, where they promise that eTextbooks are always 50% off the print version.

Webmaster's note: In one of the more bizarre name changes in history, iChapters is now calling themselves cengage brain. I'm going to continue calling them iChapters for the time being, because I feel plain stupid for calling them cengage brain.

Not bad. (There's also a refer a friend deal where you get 10% off your next order. And it looks like your friends - minimum 2 - don't even have to purchase. Scan the homepage for a link to this offer.)

And here's an added bonus...

Note the name: iChapters. If your professor only needs you to read a few chapters, you can just purchase a few e-chapters. Big savings there. (Chapters start at $1.99.) And if you go that way, the first chapter of every electronic textbook is free!

Positives and negatives of iChapters versus competitors

As far as I can tell, the companies in this field are relatively new and have access to pretty much the same inventory. Prices can differ by a few bucks here and there, but it sounds to me like iChapters has the least restrictive reading restrictions.

(By the way, iChapters operates in the UK too.)

You get a familiar Adobe Reader interface with most or all of its functionality, including highlighting and printability. (I've read of another extextbook company with a proprietary interface that drives users crazy!)

You will have to download some special software that's intended to keep you from distributing the textbook freely.

(You knew that was coming!)

Read the FAQ page on the site to make sure that information is current. (I can't update this page every day!) You will be able to download your electronic textbook to read offline, and you get two licenses, so you can read it on more than one device.

One head's up: I was NOT impressed with iChapters' title search. I looked for a book that didn't come up when I entered the title (correctly spelled, I might add!) but that was there - sure enough - when I searched by ISBN.

Moral of the story: Don't give up until you've searched by ISBN. If you don't know the book's ISBN, try snatching it from Amazon's textbook department.

iChapters, where electronic textbooks are always 50% off the print version.

Electronic textbooks should be a part of your discount textbook mix. And they'll probably become a bigger part of that mix over time.

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