From the press release:
The Digital Marketplace, an initiative of the California State University Office of the Chancellor, announced plans today to launch a pilot to license digital course content from Bedford/Freeman/Worth, Cengage Learning, McGraw-Hill Education, Pearson, and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Starting in the fall 2010 semester, pilot courses are scheduled at five CSU campuses: Dominguez Hills, Fullerton, Long Beach, San Bernardino and San Francisco State. Each participating instructor volunteered for the program that promises students will pay the lowest price available for the licensed, digital version of their course materials that are interactive and engaging. Students will purchase their personal-use subscriptions for the digital content through their local campus bookstore.
“Offering faculty the choice of a licensing model gives them the option of finding the highest quality content at the lowest cost,” said Gerard L. Hanley, PhD., Senior Director of Academic Technology Services for the CSU. “The purpose of the Digital Marketplace is to provide everyone access to quality, affordable educational content. This is a wonderful example of an academic institution and publishers working together for the benefit of our students.”
I can’t tell by reading this what’s different that what’s already done: students buy a e-text, which gives them access to the text on-line for some period of time (typically two years), for a price that is 60-70% of the printed cost.
Sort of looks like this is the same thing, trumpeted loudly.
I read it as an anti pirating move… (?)
@ Bruce Wilson is on target here. I would have thought that budget-strapped California would be leading the innovation that eBooks enable. Here’s the formula they seem to have missed: California’s universities employ some of the best and brightest in a wide variety of fields. Send an RFP to this population promising released time in exchange for textbook writing, get the texts written and published digitally and distributed to students for free. Repeat as needed. Problem solved.
University systems can easily perform the functions of publishers by providing editorial and other supports to participating faculty. The ePub standard frees us from the need for the intermediation of publishers who add little to textbooks other than costs.