September 24, 2008
College Bookstores to Begin Selling eTextbooks on Demand
Soon students will be able to buy electronic textbooks at the college bookstore, using kiosks that will download files and burn them to CD’s. The kiosks will also offer the latest Hollywood movies, which the machines will be able to burn onto DVD’s on demand.
The National Association of College Stores announced today that it has formed a spinoff company, NACS Media Solutions, to broker the deals with publishers to support the new on-demand service.
Movies will be the first product offered at the kiosks, which are scheduled to appear at seven stores next month. The plan is to add digital textbooks to the kiosks starting next summer, says Charles Schmidt, a spokesman for the association.
“As educational content and course materials evolve to include more multimedia, stores will be prepared to provide that content with lower-cost solutions,” said Mark Nelson, vice president for strategy and development at the new spinoff company.
Starting this month, students will be given the choice of buying or renting DVD’s from the kiosks. Rental DVD’s will be encoded so that the quality of the images degrade after a set period of time — meaning that essentially they self-destruct after use. “It’s not exactly like Mission: Impossible where a little puff of smoke comes out,” jokes Mr. Schmidt.
The first colleges to get the kiosks will be Bowling Green State University, New York University, San Diego State University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Thirty more stores are expected to add the kiosks by January, says Mr. Schmidt. —Jeffrey R. Young
Posted on Wednesday September 24, 2008 | Permalink |Comments
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Burned DVD’s do not support copy protection, so you could make as many copies as you wanted of one of these discs… Which is obviously not so easy with a pressed (AKA “replicated”) DVD… Seems like the studios will never go for anything that doesn’t contain Digital Rights Management…
— Tim Sep 24, 05:57 PM #
I just heard a presentation from Eric Frank of FlatWorldKnowledge at http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/minisite/ regarding how they can publish and offer free open source texts. It’s pretty interesting. And about time.
— Jim Patterson Sep 24, 07:46 PM #
McCain/Palin 2008!
As Obama and the socialist/leftist editors at the Chronicle are staining their shorts that there will be a President McCain…guess what you must do?
Live with it…you’ll see come election day that the academic socialist/left wing “can’t get over the ’60’s” crowd are outnumbered these days by a growing number of conservative youth..that can vote.Oh my! People that the leftist prof’s cannot indocrinate!
So, to this publication… that is the defintion of hypocrisy, the left-wing editors, how many people can you “ban” when you also espouse “freedom of speech?”“Speech,” to liberals is only “free” when they agree with it.
And the world sees this…students see examples of your liberal bias and attempt to halt the free exchange of ideas.
Shocking? No. Actually this publication is a great example to use in certain classes regarding how the right to freedom of speech can be abridged by leftists…..ideas are “banned” but the editors can’t realize that more and more academics, today, are not the left wing nuts from the ’60’s.
A new generation. And, as Socrates was a “gadfly,” so shall more conservative Republicans be a gadfly to the socialists that just can’t seem to retire and fuel the lies and half-truths about McCain/Palin here on this blog. You can “ban” one person…but, guess what? There are many more Republicans across this nation….and you can’t “ban” them all…you cannot silence everyone; though, I’m sure you will try. Who wins in the end.McCain/Palin…
Once they win…you can’t continue to “ban” conservative ideas. It only hurts your liberal/socialist cause.
The Chronicle….another example of silly left wing brainwashed….
Folks.
Adieu!
— Chris Sep 24, 10:21 PM #
And what does this have to do with digital textbooks? Somebody’s brainwashed all right.
— Paul Sep 25, 08:45 AM #
This might be one way that the text book companies can sell the book at a cost that will not kill the student’s budget. It seems like a good idea to me.
— Chris Ubing Sep 25, 10:03 AM #
To #3,this is not a forum for political diatribes….so get over yourself…… Ebooks are invaluable to people with low vision or those individuals who are blind. As #2 stated,“it’s about time!”
— mk Sep 25, 10:28 AM #
I think that #3 was confused and responding to another blog. Although I agree with a lot of it, Chris sounds like a right-wing nut. Easy Chris. You are going to get your way the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.
— Mary Ann Sep 25, 10:37 AM #
To #1, there are some patented technologies that allow burning of DVDs that maintain DRM equivalent to traditional “pressed” DVDs. Probably why they are using a kiosk in this case rather than just streaming downloads.
— M Sep 25, 11:14 AM #
Attention Everyone… #3 is not a person, but a political BOT that posts its garbage on forums at will. Guess we need to come up with an image-word challenge in order to post comments…Back to the topic, I love the idea of eTextbooks, still there is no standard viewer. Until that issue is solved the market will not take off.
— Patricia Sep 25, 12:02 PM #
In fields where books are revised every few years, e Textbooks could be great. Ideally they would allow individual annotations and notes. Another plus would be for fields like mine, Physical Therapy. There are movements that can be shown and multimedia contained at the pertinent place in the books would be useful.
Formats and DRM need to be resolved and students tell me they do not like reading on a computer. However we all read email on computers and phones, maybe even play video games and watch pod casts.
As for #3, they better becareful for what they wish for or “get over it” if they don’t get election result they want.
— spl Sep 25, 01:03 PM #