The lack of economics text is disappointing. For me, the real benefit of the eDGe comes from not having to print out journal articles on reams and reams of paper; I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I won't be able to purchase any texts that I use in my program for the eDGe. At most, there's only a few thousand students in the world who use the PhD-level economics texts in any given academic year, so I'm not holding my breath for any of the publishers to come out with electronic versions of them, particularly since PDFs are widely available for free all over the internet. I would imagine that publishers would expect to sell less than a hundred copies per year of electronic texts, which probably doesn't cover the conversion costs. But some of the scanned PDFs really aren't good enough to use a primary source, so I'll have to buy hardcopies (I own many of them already).

But it's not just the PhD-level economics texts that seem to be lacking... many popular undergrad economics texts (i.e., ones that I would consider using for when I start teaching next summer) don't seem to be available either (and the ones that are cost considerably more than a "like-new" used copy). I imagine that it's pretty laborious to convert to EPUB or whatever since every equation needs to carefully checked and likely rewritten. But until the publishers price etexts at or near the prevailing price of like-new used books, I'm not sure that they'll be widely adopted.

One would think that publishers would be more enthusiastic about etextbooks, as they can exercise FAR more control over the secondary market. But so far, they are pricing them at or even above the list price for a new hardcopy, which very few students actually pay.