E-books remain unpopular

After nearly two semesters of offering digital textbooks, the U-Store has had little success in pitching the digital manuscripts to students.

This fall, the U-Store participated in a nationwide college bookstore pilot program, managed by Missouri Book Services, a company that offers digital texts or "e-books" to students at prices approximately 30 percent cheaper than those of new textbooks. The pilot program, which originally included 10 college bookstores, has now expanded to over 30 schools nationwide.

But it has not caught on at Princeton.

While U-Store representatives did not disclose the exact number of e-books sold this year, the consensus among U-Store clerks was that the number was small. The store, however, plans to continue offering digital texts to students.

"[E-books have] not really been a bestseller, but we think that as it goes on, the students will probably choose digital texts more often," U-Store Director of Marketing Virginia France said. "With digital texts, you don't have to lug a book around."

Despite the reduced cost of e-books, many students believe that reading at length from computer screens and printing out large volumes of text is unappealing.

"I bought one and then returned it in favor of a paperback book," Ashley Pavlic '07 said in an email. "It would be a pain to have to print out every chapter. And e-books may be cheaper than U-Store textbooks, but they still aren't cheaper than used books online."

An additional drawback of e-books is that they cannot be resold, whereas the U-Store pays up to 50 percent of the new price for used textbooks at the end of each semester.

"We have talked to students while they are just shopping for textbooks and a lot of students have said they like books." France said. "They'd rather have a real book than the digital content."

To purchase an e-book, students locate the corresponding course card in the regular textbook section of the U-Store and have it activated upon purchase. Students then scratch off the card's seal, exposing the code used to download the text from DigitalTextbooks.net.

Texts can be downloaded only once, and after the seal is scratched, e-books are nonreturnable.

Each text is a PDF file, and can only be accessed from the original computer used to download the file. Most files come with printing limitations of about 100 pages per week, and some expire after a year.

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Students can highlight and underline texts on their computers, and can also utilize the e-book's audio feature, which reads text aloud.

One of students' primary concerns with e-books is that they lack the tangible quality of regular textbooks.

"I'm strictly a paper person," Francesca Butler '09 said. "I like having things in front of me, and reading on a computer screen's just not something I would do for studying."

"If you look at the computer screen too long, it starts to wear at your eyes," Emily Farley '08 said.

Abebooks.com, an online textbook seller, polled 5,078 students in January 2006 and found that 49 percent were not interested in digital textbooks while 23 percent were undecided. Despite misgivings as to the popularity of e-books, the U-store will continue offering them.

"The only thing we're making an attempt to do is increasing our selection, and that's by the reps going to the faculty and the faculty requesting that the e-book format is provided," Dale Schroeder, assistant textbook manager for the U-Store, said.

Currently, the U-Store e-book selection is limited, as many publishers are still in the process of obtaining the copyrights needed to format textbooks into PDF files.

"We hope to expand [the selection] to make it another choice for the students rather than buying used or new textbooks," Schroeder said.