Cutting Cost By Going Digital
Purchasing textbooks for an educational institution can be a huge budget line item, but by transitioning to digital textbooks, it is possible to reduce your cost tremendously.
Recently the state of California instituted the California Free Digital Textbook Initiative in order to help reduce the skyrocketing cost of purchasing traditionally published paper textbooks for their students. Purchasing physical textbooks is often a practice in futility. Try as you might, the physical product will deteriorate with time. Now imagine purchasing the actual content of and rights to the textbook and storing this textbook on your own servers or a free digital repository. The initial investment could be great depending on the text decided upon, but you would never have to purchase another textbook again. Instead, only simple maintenance would be required to keep your text up-to-date.
Now, you might be wondering "wouldn't the cost of the textbook simply be replaced with the cost of expensive laptops and other eReaders"? Not Necessarily. Rhaptos allows you to export your texts to an on-demand print publisher and print the book for a fraction of what a traditionally published textbook would cost. As an example, a typical high school level statistics book retails for around $120, but an open-source statistics book printed by an on-demand publisher costs only around $30.
At UniqU, we have a great deal of experience creating and maintaining digital texts, and we can help you decide the best way to leverage new digital textbook technologies.