Rio Salado College, the largely virtual institution in Arizona’s Maricopa County Community College District, hopes to save its students money by tailoring textbooks to their classes.

The college announced today a partnership with Pearson Custom Publishing and the Follett Higher Education Group to create customized textbooks containing only the materials required for Rio Salado courses. According to the college’s president, Linda M. Thor, the program could reduce students’ textbook costs by as much as 50 percent.

Colleges and universities have long looked to customizing services to make their textbooks cheaper, more relevant, or up to date. But Rio Salado may be the first to offer custom textbooks on such a scale.

The college, which offers 450 online classes and has more than 48,000 for-credit students, will phase in the new books beginning in December, and expects that, by October 2009, 90 percent of the textbooks it uses will be customized. —Paula Wasley