It’s August, which of course means an explosion of news articles about how expensive textbooks are and what poor college students are doing these days to keep these costs down.  Where people buy their textbooks and how they actually read them is becoming more and more varied and confusing, making bookselling the latest perfectly good business model to be demolished by the Internet.

Here are the interesting textbook-buying trends that I’ve been paying attention to lately:

• Buying Used Textbooks – This is certainly not new and is now a standard way for students to get their textbooks each semester.  And as Internet search becomes more sophisticated it is becoming even easier.  There are tons of sites to buy used textbooks, but I found you can’t go wrong with amazon.com, bigwords.com, half.com, textbookx.com, textbooks.com, or good ‘ol craigslist.org.
• Textbooks from other countries! – I recently received a tip about nbcindia.com from a classmate of mine.  The books are priced in rupees and the book you receive is reportedly a black and white soft cover copy of your textbook.  But they are really cheap.  This site recommends (among other things) checking out the foreign versions of American websites, like www.amazon.co.uk, to find cheaper versions of the textbook you want.  This blog post mentions two great sites for finding the international versions of textbooks: abebooks.com and textbooksrus.com.
• Textbook Rentals – This recent NY Times article discusses the rise of textbook renting as a profitable business model for textbook publishers and authors.  Chegg.com and bookrenter.com are mentioned in the article and seem to be the most popular sites for this.

• eTextbooks – This is a market that is slowly evolving and maturing.  The newest Kindle DX and the rumored Apple iTablet are certainly making some big waves in the textbook world.  There are lots of good and bad things about these, as I discuss below.  As far as where to buy eTextbooks, I’ve found amazon.com,  cafescribe.com, coursesmart.com, digitaltextbooks.com, etextshop.com, vitalsource.com, ichapters.com, and zinio.com.

fyi: Most of the sites I mentioned above (and a whole lot more) can be found in this great list.  The post says the sites are all geared toward business school textbooks, but really it’s just a huge list of textbook sellers.

More on eTextbooks

Why I’m not a fan of normal textbooks:

• They are out-of-sight expensive if you buy them new;
• They are heavy and bulky;
• When you buy them used from random folks on the Internet you can’t completely trust the shipper;
• The best search function these things have is their indexes.  I mean, come on.

Why I really like the idea of eTextbooks:

• All text in them is instantly searchable;
• All that I buy will fit inside my computer;
• When I buy one, I get it instantly;
• They are much cheaper than new textbooks.

So I actually bought an accounting eTextbook from iChapters.com last year.  While all the above held true, there were times when I regretted my purchase:

• Bad software and DRM ruined the user experience:  When I downloaded my book last year, iChapters made use of this program called Unsealer, which was the key to unlocking the big-time DRM their products come imprisoned in.  It took me hours of searching online forums to figure out how to make this crappy program actually open my book file.  Finally, I discovered that it only works with an old version of Adobe Acrobat Reader for Mac, which resulted in more time wasted scouring to web to find this out-of-date version of the reader software.  Once I got the Adobe Reader to open my file I could use the book as advertised, but Adobe would crash on me fairly regularly.  (Most likely because it was an old version).
• My eTextbook was harder to navigate quickly in class than its physical counterparts:  My accounting class made heavy use of the textbook during class lectures.  Therefore, there was a lot of rapid flipping back-and-forth between two or three pages in the book while answering in-class questions.  This is harder to do on a vertical scrolling text file on your computer screen.  Also, the page numbers in the textbook itself did not correspond to the page numbers that Adobe Reader assigns to each page in the eBook.  It was therefore difficult to quickly flip to a page in the text when directed by the professor.
• My eTextbook had a lack of editing tools: When using a traditional textbook, most people find it useful to highlight important sections and write little notes in the margins while studying.  Surprise surprise, I couldn’t do anything like this using an outdated version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, nor could I cut text out of the document and paste it into a Word document because of DRM garbage.  My workaround for this was to take notes on the book using Evernote, and cut and paste screenshots of important parts of the book using the FANTASTIC program called Skitch.  This worked for me, but obviously wasn’t an ideal arrangement.
• I can’t resell my eTextbook: Even though I don’t want to anyway, my eTextbook does not allow me to sell it to someone else.

But I still have faith in eTextbooks, and I think I’m going to try one again this semester.  I plan to use coursesmart.com to rent one for 180 days.  The company has been getting a lot of good press, mostly from its recent unveiling of its iPhone application.  I’m mostly excited about the great software that their products use, as they address many of the problems I’ve had in the past with eTextbooks.

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