My company offers its electronic publications for about 70 percent less than the cost of a traditional print book of comparable quality. Sure, electronic publishing will introduce a number of new costs to be considered. Web sites will have to be built and hosted. Interactive features, such as a computer-animated demonstration of a science experiment, could be very costly to create. It's also important for educators to fully embrace the changes that technology will ultimately inject into texts.
Electronic books can incorporate news and developments in a matter of weeks or days.
Sociology textbooks can quickly add the dramatic new numbers on the composition of the U.S. population from the 2000 census. Political science textbooks can immediately incorporate analysis of the 2000 presidential election. And genetics textbooks can link directly to databases of the human genome project. With e-books, professors even get the chance to customize texts to meet the needs of their students. Math professors can add additional practice if students need it.