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As a former textbook author myself, I have to say that it's a complete fallacy to claim that digital textbooks could halve the price of the books. The reasons textbooks are expensive are two-fold:
1. They have extremely restricted sales compared to print books. Sales of 5000 copies would be utterly pathetic for a novel; it would be good for a textbook.
2. They are very, very expensive to typeset, often containing numerous diagrams, charts, equations, etc.
The actual cost of printing the book is negligible compared to these factors. You might save a couple of quid by not printing the book, but to claim that the price could be halved is nonsensical.
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