e-textbooks

boston.com: The paper version of “Psychology,” a popular college textbook by David G. Myers, weighs nearly 5 pounds and costs roughly $90 new and $70 used. The digital version is easy on a backpack and costs $55. Which would you choose?
CourseSmart LLC, a new company backed by the nation’s biggest textbook publishers, is betting that many tech-savvy students looking to save some money will select the e-textbook.
The Belmont, Calif., company is still in beta, refining its digital-book format and its business model. It offers about 2,000 e-textbooks now and hopes to have far more by next fall. But already CourseSmart is attracting considerable attention, particularly from college bookstores, which earn most of their revenue selling new and used textbooks and fear the publishers will sell directly to students and elbow them aside.
Frank Lyman, executive vice president for marketing and business development at CourseSmart, said bookstores will continue to play a vital role in the textbook market, but he acknowledged the relationship between publishers and bookstores is changing.
Publishers are “not looking to cut out the bookstores, but certainly there’s some shaking out of their relationship that’s going to happen as we migrate to digital,” he said.
That migration is still in its infancy, but there is a growing belief in publishing circles that electronic textbooks have a real chance of catching on because of the savings, the convenience, and the features they have to offer.
A textbook ending? [boston.com]