eBooks in School

The times they are a-changin’.

This post seems to be older than 17 years—a long time on the internet. It might be outdated.

I went into the Campus Bookstore to buy some 0.5mm pencil graphite and ended up chatting with Ann Fraley, Barnes & Nobles VP Stores for Territory 4 for the better part of 15 minutes (Full Disclosure: the CSM Campus Bookstore is operated by B&N).
I asked Ed Showers, who runs the bookstore, about eBooks (I use eBook to mean any book that is available electronically). Ed directed me to Ms. Fraley, who was standing next to him. Here’s the low down:

  • Pearson Education (parent company of Prentice Hall, “the world’s largest publisher of academic and reference textbooks”) is pretty much the only publisher who produce eBooks.
  • McGraw also produces some eBooks, but to a much lesser extent.
  • In order to get access to eBooks, the course instructor must explicitly allow the bookstore to sell them
  • Most eBooks are only accessible through the web.
  • Some eBooks allow printing, but only a set percentage of the total pages (e.g. 30% of the book)

I’m now going to email all my profs for next semester and have them allow access to the eBooks.

[tags]colorado school of mines, college, tablet, barnes and noble, electronic book, ebook, McGraw, Pearson, Ann Fraley, Ed Showers, for Robert Scoble, for Gary Anderson[/tags]

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