Digital textbook business slowly grows

Students at 400 colleges and universities will have the opportunity to download their textbooks online at the cost for $20 per book through a service offered by Flat World Knowledge.

While hard copies of the books often cost $100 or more, the service allows students to purchase a PDF of the book for much less. And, seeing that students are required to buy books for up to six classes per semester, purchasing books is not cheap at all. Furthermore, the books are created and managed using open-source software, meaning that professors can edit the book and add supplemental materials as they please.

In addition to the obvious benefit of reducing costs, digital textbooks are also great for the environment because they cut down on the huge amount of paper required to print all of the textbooks that are used every year in the U.S. We certainly hope that this small, but growing, field continues to partner with more and more colleges and universities.

For more info on this digital textbook service, check out this story from cnn.com