Electronic Textbooks Offer Students Savings And Convenience

(NAPSI)-There's good news for students looking for ways to save--particularly on textbooks. Many are now enjoying the discounts and added convenience offered by electronic textbooks.

The College Board reports that students pay an average of $1,000 per year on traditional textbooks, more than 15 percent of the annual tuition at an average public school.

Fortunately, a growing number of higher-education textbook publishers are now offering eTextbooks as an alternative to the traditional, pricey print texts. CourseSmart, for example, currently offers students more than a third of all college textbooks as eTextbooks at an average discount of 50 percent.

These savings can help students avoid a reliance on end-of-semester bookstore buybacks, which can be significantly less than expected.

Lucky students may be able to recoup 50 percent of their up-front costs by selling their texts back to the bookstore, but most students know that they are more likely to get $5 or $10 back, or worse, find they can't sell back the book at all. With an eTextbook, the student saves 50 percent up front and eliminates the burden of trying to sell the book.

Savings alone, however, are not the only reason more students are turning to electronic texts. There is also added convenience.

For example, when students are studying and writing papers, instead of searching endlessly through a textbook or a semester's notes for a particular subject or passage, they can use a search function that enables students to immediately pinpoint all references to a particular subject throughout an entire text.

In addition, electronic textbooks share many characteristics with print textbooks, such as allowing students the ability to highlight important passages and take notes. Students can also cut and paste text into study guides, print out important pages and choose between online or downloadable formats to access their textbook.

Many students say there are physical benefits as well. If one big text is heavy, four can be a pain in the back-literally. Fortunately for students who use eTextbooks, all they need is a laptop to access the material they are looking for, at any time, anywhere.

On today's Wi-Fi-enabled campuses, laptop accessibility makes it possible to integrate the electronic textbook with other online learning resources, such as Blackboard, library databases, Wikipedia and Google.

Visit www.CourseSmart.com to learn more.

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AccessText Network Created in Collaboration with University of Georgia Will Improve Student Access to College Textbook Content

The Association of American Publishers has signed an agreement with the Alternative Media Access Center, an initiative of the Georgia Board of Regents and the University of Georgia, to develop and launch the AccessText Network, a comprehensive, national online system that will make it easier and quicker for students with print-related disabilities, such as blindness, to obtain the textbooks they need for their college courses.

The program at UGA is part of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.


"AMAC is energized about working in conjunction with the disability community to guarantee AccessText becomes the conduit between the publishing world and post-secondary institutions' disability programs nationwide," said Christopher Lee, department head and director of AMAC."We are charged with making AccessText the national nucleus of post-secondary distribution of approved alternative textbook file exchanges, training and technical support. Our goal is to make the college disability professional's job easier and, in the long run, help save institutions from the high cost of producing electronic textbooks for their students with disabilities."

Many college students with disabilities are struggling to use required or recommended print textbooks that are essential to their course success, said Patricia Schroeder, AAP's president and chief executive officer.

"By improving the efficiencies of our present process, AccessText will facilitate quicker access to content for more students," she said.

The new AccessText Network will improve the way electronic versions of print textbooks are delivered to campus-based disability student service offices from publishers and streamline the permission process for scanning copies of print textbooks when publisher files are unavailable.

"This project would have not been possible without the early support and direction of Noel Gregg, director of the Franklin UGA Regents Center for Learning Disorders," said Lee. "The AMAC project was incubated under that center, and Noel was a co-founder of AMAC making the project a reality."

The network, scheduled for beta launch in February 2009, will ensure that institutions can more easily obtain information about publishers' course materials, request electronic text files and use more efficient acquisition and distribution channels.

AccessText Network is being funded through donations from publishers Cengage Learning; CQ Press; Macmillan; McGraw-Hill Education; Pearson; Reed Elsevier Inc.; John Wiley & Sons; and W.W. Norton.

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