Textbooks accessed on a computer are a promising way for students to save money, but a new study says companies are actually exploiting these digital textbooks to make students pay more.
To use the books on the Internet, companies have students pay for a password that expires at the end of the course, eliminating the opportunity for students to sell back books and forcing them to pay full price for a digital book each semester, according to the Student Public Interest Research Groups study.
The 50 digital books Student PIRGs studied cost as much as a new hard copy of the same book and an average of 39 percent more than a used hard copy.
In addition, for every book in the study, only 10 pages could be printed at a time.
“Right now, publishers are on a crash course with e-textbooks,” according to the study.
“They are expensive and impractical for a large portion of the student population.”
The report supports using “open textbooks,” digital books with nonrestrictive licenses that can be accessed for free on the Internet. Companies that sell that form plan to profit by also selling study aids, print books and audio books.
But the Association of American Publishers countered, saying the report is not credible.
“E-textbooks keep publishers’ No. 1 goal — students learning — as their top priority,” Bruce Hildebrance, the association’s executive director for higher education, said in a statement.
“PIRGs’ recent report ignores course material quality, content and value to student learning, choosing instead to focus on its constantly changing and arbitrary criteria of affordability, printing options and accessibility.”
