The Evolution of Affordable Content Efforts in the Higher Education Environment: Programs, Case Studies and Examples

Hyper-inflation in the overall college costs and textbook prices in the last decade is no secret as covered by several major news reports. High textbook prices are deterring students from buying the required textbooks in a course or taking courses that have high-priced textbooks. In other words, cost of textbooks gets in the way of learning and derails students from degrees that they want pursue in college. Many universities and even state systems (Acker, 2011) are trying to lower the cost of textbooks for students. Indiana University, as one of these institutions started a pilot e-textbook program in 2009 to make the publisher/commercial content more affordable based on inclusive access model, which is addressed in more detail in the previous two chapters of this book. After a successful pilot phase, the program, also known as the IU eTexts Program, grew into full production. As of December 2017, IU eTexts program has served close to 200,000 students in almost 8,000 course sections and have saved students more than $13 million in textbook costs. In this chapter, we explain the research efforts behind the program, faculty and student support, and factors behind the program's success.