About ten years ago as the digital book revolution got under way in earnest, the industry’s pioneers agreed that e-books would take off only when a generation of students had matured and begun demanding its content online.

That day appears to have come. With textbook prices tripling since 1986 and rising at twice the national inflation rate, students are looking at school books the way they looked at music CDs – if there’s a cheap or free way to get their hands on them, they will.

“Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet,” writes Tamar Lewin of the New York Times, “but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.”

That will come as welcome news to many of the nation’s 17 million students. Both the cost and the weight of book-laden backpacks can be crippling.

But for publishers of textbooks and college bookstores it will feel as if the Death Star has just launched a doomsday weapon. Textbooks are a $5.5 billion industry, representing about 25% of the entire US book market. According to the National Association of College Stores, in 2007-08, students spent an average of $488 on new and used course materials in the college store or its online equivalent. The average price of a new textbook in 2008 was $57, and for a used one, $49. Some textbooks cost over $100 and the total book fees at some schools can exceed $1000 a year.

The loss of a good chunk of that revenue is going to put a big hurt on all who make a living from textbooks (and let’s not forget the authors!). Nevertheless, that seems to be the way the world is going. “In five years,” says the superintendent of one county serving half a million students, “I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks”

Though publishers are repurposing their textbook content for online delivery, the pressure by colleges to hold costs down will make digitally delivered content far less profitable than books packaged in hard covers.

The state leading the charge to take textbooks digital is California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who balked at the cost and half-joked that the weight of printed textbooks was daunting even for him, an international bodybuilding champion. His initiative is to replace high school math and science textbooks with open source digital versions, which are free thanks to the efforts of CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit group. CK-12 has adapted textbooks to meet state education standards.

“With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” writes Lewin in In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History. If the experiment is successful, what happens in California is not going to stay in California.

Cengage Learning, however, is trying another approach: renting textbooks. It will rent them for 40% to 70% off list price for as little as two months and as long as 130 days, according to another article by Lewin. When the rental ends, students have a choice of returning the books or buying them.

One of the benefits of Cengage’s business model is author compensation. “’Our authors will get royalties on second and third rentals, just as they would on a first sale,’” Lewin quotes Cengage’s CEO. In the traditional model, textbook authors never receive royalties on resales.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.