Customised books
September 28th, 2004Read an interesting article today on O’reilly’s books in Business 2.0. It stated that especially college students would benefit from this phenomenon of custom printing.
Professors could add up different text from a number of text books, then add some essays, articles and possibly midterm exams into the “to-come” book. Then the book will be printed and shipped to the school’s bookstore. Sounds pretty useful to me. I definitely could have used this kind of service in Mikkeli, when I was in the BBA program. We studied in 3-week modules and were made to buy books almost in 3 week intervals. For a program that cost over 3,500€ (I know it’s not a lot, but it’s one of the few programs in Finland that cost) and spending 50-60€ per each 3 weeks on a new book was too much.
But what amazes me here is that why not take this a step further - enable the students to buy a digital version of the book as well. I know this might become a problem with people sharing the copies of the books, but the cost of each book could be brought down even more. Making them buyable would seriously cut down on copyright infringements. Ultimately, you would only be paying the copyrights in the book, isn’t that after all the ideal situation for a student? He or she could print the required pages on the school printer that she does not want to read off the screen.
I would have definitely been reading more e-books if I’d had the chance…
Feel free to read on with some related posts:
- DRM and e-Books
- Webcast: Battle over books
- Would you pay $8.50 for shipping?
- Bookstores
- Thoughts on blogging with MT
