Quote:
Originally Posted by nekokami
I use my iLiad in my doctoral program constantly. At the level of courses I'm taking now, most of the readings are journal articles, which I download in PDF form from JStore, etc. I make notes on the PDF files (I've never been one to write in books, but I did have a habit of writing on printed PDFs),
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and that could lead more publishers to try textbooks in ebook format, leading to undergraduates using a unit like this as well. Of course, there are also open-source textbooks from Wikimedia and others, but I think most universities are too tied to faculty-authored (or at least faculty-selected) textbooks for these to quite take over the market. Yet.
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That's the case where I teach graduate courses: pretty much everything I hand out is self-authored, or authored jointly with other faculty. I've provided those in pdf and for free to my students for a while now. Pretty much all my colleagues do the same.
PDF is fine -- but I'd love to be able to also offer a real "ebook" format such as mobi or epub for my students.
We're in a technical field, and write all our stuff in LaTeX. If only there was a mobi or epub output from LaTeX, it'd be a piece of cake to essentially overnight ensure that our department would be "e-book-supported".
(In case anyone knows, is there a latex2ebook anywhere that works "out of the box"???)
However: for this to take off, price has to be right. We've been providing, for free, hard-copies of lecture notes since forever, and since quite a few years, also pdf's. Last year, I stopped distributing hard-copies in my classes, but only the pdfs. Essentially, our students have a "zero book budget" -- so requiring a 750 USD Illiad would likely not go down well. I'd suppose that the price has to be well below 200 USD, and some "killer feature" available, before we could assume that the students would be willing to invest...
And, before you ask, we're in the EU, not the US
