Digital Textbooks Gaining Favor

(page 2 of 2)

Still, e-books are meeting a need. On Facebook, disgruntled students have formed more than 20 protest groups including Textbooks are too Expensive!!, which has 433 members, and I Got Robbed by the Bookstore and I will get Robbed Again, which has 185. "Students are rubbing their eyes in disbelief as they leave college bookstores," reads one group description. "And publishers are laughing all the way to the bank." (That's not entirely true: According to the National Association of College Stores, publishers only make 7 cents on every dollar that's spent on a new textbook. The rest goes to authors, marketers, printers, college stores, and shipping companies.)

Illegal Textbooks

Some group message boards contain links to free textbook-downloading sites, which illegally distribute copyrighted content. One of the biggest domains, TextbookTorrents.com, was recently shuttered due to "concern of legal action," according to a statement by "Geekman," the site's moderator. Yet similar hubs have risen to take its place, which irks Stacy Skelly, director of higher education at the American Association of Publishers, whose membership includes McGraw-Hill. "You don't go into a bookstore and rip a book off the shelf because it's too expensive," she says. "[People who use] these Web sites are stealing."

Such textbook thieves might prefer taking a class with Noel Capon. Copping a play from British pop group Radiohead—which let fans set the price of their last album, "In Rainbows"—the Columbia Business School professor is letting people download his marketing textbook, Managing Marketing in the 21st Century (Wessex Press, 2008), for free. It's available on his Web site, www.mm21c.com, which lures 100 unique visitors each day. Early next year, Capon will ask students to pay however much they think it's worth, and profit (or not) accordingly.

He's not the only one skewering the status quo. R. Preston McAfee, an economics professor at California Institute of Technology, also put his textbook, Introduction to Economic Analysis, online for free. And next spring, Flat World Knowledge, a Nyack (N.Y.)-based publishing firm, will upload 10 open-source college textbooks to its Web site. "Authors, professors, students—people are screaming about the status of our industry," says Jeff Shelsted, the co-founder and CEO of Flat World and a former editorial director at Prentice Hall. "We're trying to address the pain points."

In July, Congress passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act, a provision of which requires publishers to release more information about textbook prices. It also restricts "bundling," or selling a textbook packaged with supplemental materials, which has been a principal cause of price inflation. Thirty-four states have proposed or passed similar legislation.

The Congressional changes, which are designed to help students, will take effect in 2010. Capon, for one, is glad he's starting now. "Textbook prices are out of sight," he says. "It's time to shake things up."

Macsai is a writer for BusinessWeek.