Student Loophole or Opportunity for Publishers to Create A New Textbook Model

Currently, there are subscription-based electronic databases that legally house 1000's of complete textbook titles that can be accessed by both students and faculty. One example is Books 24x7, which mainly focuses on business and IT discipline titles.

Out of curiosity, I have worked with library faculty to develop embedded links to this database to offer students a textbook option that delivers high-quality textbook content electronically... At no cost to them. With a clear course plan of key terms and concepts that students need to achieve course objectives, we mapped each key term and concepts, via embedded links, back to no less than 16 textbooks housed in the Books 24x7 ebook database.

This exercise has been an amazing learning experience for me as an instructor and as a consumer of textbooks.

For many faculty, textbook reps show up individually, present us with updated editions of textbooks that are accompanied with any number of course supplements that include, companion websites, test banks, power points, videos, sample syllabi, etc., etc.

In general, this model has worked... Faculty receive vetted content to share and distribute to students and student expectations are met because they receive a syllabus, a required textbook and marching orders for the course.

This is not a poor model, but it is difficult for me not to only question this model but to challenge it by providing students with an option that satisfies or exceeds course objectives, becomes a "click away" for users, requires no additional money from students and takes advantage of an existing electronic library resource.

It's silly to even say, "things have changed." Available high-quality content for numerous disciplines is not only readily available but can be fed to us based on individual interests via RSS feeds and simple permanent URLs.

Linking students to key terms and concepts in my current Introduction to Marketing course may be a short-term loophole that only current and near-future students can benefit from.  Surely, publishers who contribute licensed content to Books24x7 did not envision their texts being accessed in such a way, and my fear is that, as much as I would love this model to catch on, if it does, publishers may be less willing to participate in these ebook aggregators.  In the meantime,  I will continue to improve this model with colleagues to maximize the potential for sharing relevant content from existing ebook databases.

However, I realize there is still a large market of my colleagues that benefit the traditional textbook model. My challenge would be for publishers to reevaluate their model to identify how they can develop and sustain a system where electronic textbooks from multiple publishers that support multiple disciplines can be available to students and accessed in this manner without the loophole closing.