In high school, students get free textbooks. So you can imagine the sticker shock these poor students experience when they go to college and realize that textbooks are, on average, over $60 per book. Most students spend on average between $800-900 per year on textbooks.
In high school, textbooks cost between $500-$600 per student. As you can imagine, in an economy where schools are forced to slash budgets, administrators are looking for ways to save money.
Enter e-books.
There is a movement in higher education around Open Educational Resources (OER). These OERs might be a flash tool, an entire course, or a textbook. The only caveat is that they be open, or in other words, free to use, reuse and distribute. Business models are springing up around these OERs, and one of the most interesting for cash-strapped schools should be open textbooks.
Several open textbook movements are starting to surface. Imagine a high school student who only needs to carry around one Kindle with all her books on it. She can take notes right on the device. With the price of the books effectively zero, the school could buy the device instead.
Sound like a pipe dream? Let’s look at the numbers. Texas spends over 600 million dollars on textbooks each year. There are roughly 4.2 million high school students in Texas schools. If you were to buy every one of them a Kindle, it would run you 583 million. You’d come out saving 17 million dollars. But if the students kept the Kindles for all four years of high school, you’d save 1.8 billion in textbook costs.
Now some may not like the switch. In fact Amazon ran a pilot with 80 college students, and the result were less than stellar. However the challenges were fixable, and it will be interesting to see if Kindle implements the feedback.
But even if you offered an alternative, it’s basically sixes either way. You can provide e-books at roughly the same cost as print books. Think of the environmental savings you’d be looking at.
Even if school districts don’t make the switch, I’ll wager students will, especially college students. Think of the ‘classics’ that you have to read in English, political science, history, and more. By the time you add up those books (anything before 1923 is in the public domain, and free to get), you can probably pay for your kindle.
And how long do you think it will be before current textbooks are scanned in and pirated? Can you say Napster? Or maybe more appropriately, can you say Book Liberator?
Either way you look at it, students pay a lot for books. You have a very poor target population, and a huge potential savings. Watch for first piracy, then the publishers coming in with more rational prices in a hopes to stay relevant.
Sources
http://lubbockonline.com/local-news/2010-08-16/e-books-may-be-future-schools
http://www.back2college.com/shock.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textbook#K-12_textbooks
http://www.edweek.org/media/texas_eperc.pdf
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8540381/
