iChapters.com - Online Textbook Resource
My finance professor had an interesting method of dealing with our textbook. He went through an online retailer which he bought the appropriate intellectual property licenses from, and then he charged us our portion of that fee. But that way he was able to pick and choose specific chapters out of the best textbooks and give us only the material that we were going to actually use in the class. We were able to access the books through a digital format, but he also printed a copy for each of us so we could still easily read it and highlight it, etc. The fee for everything was something like $20-30 instead of having to buy a certain book (or two or three) for $70-100 each. We weren’t able to sell the book when we were done, but it saved a lot of money and gave us only the concentrated information that we needed. It would have been really useful if our accounting class had used the same technique. We used a 1300-page book, from which we maybe referenced a third of the material, and the book was well over $100 and new editions seemed to come out every semester for it so the resale value was constantly being eaten away.
College students need more choice when it comes to buying their textbooks, and it would be nice if one of those choices was the online, digital format. There’s a new website from the Thomson Learning Company that seems to be headed in this direction. It’s called iChapters.com. It seems to have a fairly limited supply of books at the moment, but I browsed the site and found a few that I have used in previous classes. I probably could have saved some money buying only the parts of the books that I needed to. Check out the site and feel free to comment here about what you think.
Other posts about college textbooks include:
College Textbook Prices
The Reasons Behind Rising College Textbook Prices
TextbookPower.com
Laura Freberg’s Breakdown of Textbook Prices
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August 11th, 2006 at 11:43 am
That’s awesome… If only all professors were that cool.