From Against-the-Grain:
Etextbooks are the latest and, some would say, last major eBook category to finally start opening up to active experimentation and sales development worldwide. Over the last year or so we have seen a number of new and innovative business models, pricing ideas, and interactive or “born digital” products being explored by major Publishers as well as new market entrants. These new suppliers, distributors, and aggregators are developing some innovative approaches to eTextbook supply that are in some cases challenging, and in others sitting alongside the established players.
Against the Grain asked Maverick Outsource Services to explore this debate in more detail and to co-ordinate a series of special report articles in upcoming issues regarding the emerging future for eTextbooks.
Via Resource Shelf
I thought the article tried to present a balanced view. My sole experience with e-textbooks thus far has been horrible, I could only read it on a PC (i.e. not download it to any device), could not annotate it, the search feature only worked on part of it, could not cut and paste from it (not even a handful of words) to cite in work, could not do anything except look at it, really. AND it expired as soon as the course was done. If it’s going to expire, it has to be MUCH cheaper than the print version. This was only $15 cheaper. For $15 more, I would have rather get the paper version and been able to keep it, especially as the on-line version did not offer any benefits, really (I still had to manually type into another window when I wanted to cite something, just like with paper, for instance).