When a new textbook costs $150 or $200, the maximum fine for downloading copyright material is $5,000, and the probability of being caught and convicted is fairly low (especially for those who know how to take appropriate precautions), it is surprising that anyone actually buys textbooks.
This suggests that textbooks may not end up as e-books. Instead, a textbook might be a web service delivered from “the cloud.” To me, this makes more sense educationally as well as economically. The e-textbook should not just be apdf file. It should be interactive.
Ivo Welch provides a good example of a new generation of textbooks. The book is free online (no pdf) and customized for tablets, but hardcopies can be purchased essentially at production cost.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/economists-advise-nations-poor-to-invent-the-next,33573/
Who’s the man in the middle, proffering sage advice?
“The e-textbook should not just be apdf file. It should be interactive.”
My (college-aged) kids have had interactive, internet-based textbooks and also PDFs. The PDFs were clearly better for a couple of reasons. First, no full-time internet connection is needed, but more importantly the interactive texts were crippled in maddening ways (for example, there was no way to full-text searching across the entire ‘book’).