Quote:
Originally Posted by sdive
what are the reasons why publishers are not selling e-textbooks direct to students via amazon etc (very few titles available). is it because traditionally purchase of textooks was driven by lecturer recommendations?
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Because most students don't have the extra dollars to buy an e-reader.
Because e-readers are not designed to read text books, not even a 13" tablet would fit the need. Many times, one would need to have 2 pages side by side when reading a text book - reading one page while referring to a diagram at another page. One couldn't do that conveniently with an e-reader.
E-reader is a very poor choice for books with lots of diagrams and pictures especially the one with Math notations. Kindle doesn't even have native support for alpha, beta and gamma and most books I have seen with Math notations simply convert the formula to jpeg which has very poor scaling.
Until text books are written from scratch with e-reader in mind, most students prefer to read printed books.