Interesting story in the Daily Breeze about California State University, Dominguez Hills finding a way around expensive college textbooks:
The Carson campus is among six of CSU's 23 locations to take part in a pilot program in which students, beginning this year, are able to purchase digital textbooks for temporary use. The program is analogous to Netflix in that digital access to the books is temporary: At the end of the semester, students "return" their books as their passwords expire....The digital-rental option generally cuts costs by 65percent and is just one of an emerging array of alternatives.
But wait -- there are even more choices for students:
An organized website of coursework created and posted by the professors themselves. The materials are free to not only students but also any member of the public with an interest in the topic. The site, called Merlot.org, is akin to the free software created as part of the "open source" movement that gave rise to phenomena like Wikipedia, which certainly wasn't good for the encyclopedia industry.
More fodder for the digital textbook conversation.