McGraw-Hill Education

The textbook publisher McGraw-Hill Higher Education announced a pilot program with University of Minnesota bookstores last week that may eventually make early semester lines and sold-out core texts as obsolete as the diskette.

McGraw-Hill will offer its complete catalog of more than 1,600 e-books to University of Minnesota students starting in the 2012 fall semester (the number of participating students was not yet available). Professors decide whether to sign up their classes.

The full texts will cost significantly less than a hard copy and appear in the university’s learning management system, or online interface, as soon as a student registers for a class. Tom Malek, the vice president of learning solutions and services for McGraw-Hill Higher Education, said the company’s standard rate for e-books was 40 percent of the list price, but that they would charge slightly less in this program. The amount is billed to the student as a course fee, and if students drop a course before the end of the add/drop period, they will not be charged.

The program comes after another that began this year and that was designed to lower the cost of e-books by buying them in bulk. Mr. Malek said that lower prices were not the sole intended benefit of the initiative.

“We want to provide not just a price alternative but a student experience alternative,” Mr. Malek said. “Affordability is the headline, but student success is what needs to be the headline here.”

He cited a high rate of attrition for courses in the United States, particularly general education classes, which he thought was often a result of students who fell behind in their reading because they delayed buying books. “What happens a lot is that kids get behind, and they never catch up,” Mr. Malek said. “One of the things that’s solved with our e-materials is that you have it immediately. You don’t fall behind.”

The e-textbooks are designed to work across multiple platforms because they will eventually be available over a number of different e-text readers. (The University of Minnesota uses Courseload.) Many e-text readers will allow students to download textbooks, so they can be read without Internet access.

The e-textbooks also offer assessment, adaptive learning and social networking applications, depending on the e-text reader used. Courseload allows students to interact with their professors and one another, and to send feedback to the book’s author (for example, a professor could point out an important paragraph, and students could tell a textbook author when a concept is unclear).

Mr. Malek said that piracy was not a concern because students automatically bought the books when they joined a class.

Paper textbooks will still be available for professors who prefer to assign them.

Mr. Malek said another purpose of the pilot program was to create a scalable model for the burgeoning e-textbook industry, one he compared to Ticketmaster.

“Right now, we sell our books to the bookstore, and they mark them up and sell them to the students,” Mr. Malek said. “We’re buying shelf space. Our hope is that a service fee model will replace the shelf space model.”

Do you think the benefits of an e-textbook outweigh the downsides? If you had a choice, which would you pick? Tell us in the comment box below.