Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Why Aren’t There e-casebooks?

In commenting (harshly) on Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader, SF writer Charles Stross observes:

The ideal launch market for an ebook reader exists; it’s college students and academics. They’re used to paying over $1000 a year for textbooks and often up to $100 for a single book. The books are big and heavy and they need to carry them around. The books go out of date — an ebook reader with an online subscription service for correcting errata and adding supplementary material would be perfect. If Amazon had designed their hardware a little bit differently, then stitched up a deal with Elsevier and the other big publishers of peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, they could have rented pre-loaded Kindles out to students for $1000 a year and shifted container ships full of the things on day 1.

As a casebook and treatise author and user, this is an issue that pushes a lot of my buttons. In many respects, I suspect Stross is right. So why hasn’t it happened yet? Follow the money. How do publishers and authors make money in the e-book format? It’s not just a question of DRM in terms of unauthorized copying. As a casebook author, my biggest competition is not other casebooks but the used book market for my own books. The drop off in the second and third years following publication of a new edition is huge. You’d have to figure out some form of planned obsolensence to ensure that one generation of students couldn’t simply pass electronic editions down to the next.

People have been talking about this issue since at least 1992, but change seems to be glacial. Will it ever come?