futuramb:

infoneer-pulse:

A game-changing e-textbook project at Indiana University—in which the university requires certain students to purchase e-textbooks and negotiates unusually low prices by promising publishers large numbers of sales—now has the participation of major textbook publishers, and university officials plan to expand the effort.

Today McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced that it has agreed to join the project, which has been in a pilot stage for more than a year. A handful of other publishers—John Wiley & Sons; Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group; W.W. Norton; and Flat World Knowledge—have signed on to the effort as well.

Here’s how it works: Students in a select group of courses are required to pay a materials fee, which gets them access to the assigned electronic textbooks or other readings for the course. The university essentially becomes the broker of the textbook sales, and because it is buying in bulk and guaranteeing a high volume, officials say they can score better prices than can the campus bookstore or other retailers.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)

Hmm… so the publishers are using the university organization to blackmail students with a 20% decreased price in order to get them used to e-books and at the same time becoming dependent on the publisher as a provider of e-books?

What Indiana U should see here is that they are in the longer run supporting the publisher’s agenda of permanenting themselves in the educational system, a system which have all the possibilities in the world of transforming education away from traditional dependencies which is just draining and slowing down the knowledge spreading and learning process.

Posted at 6:26am and tagged with: education, higher education, textbooks, ebooks, books, students,.