Conclusion 2. Unclear evidence to support increased affordability

Certainly, there are instances where some students are saving a great deal of money. However, with the data available at this point, we cannot conclude that the eText/IPM initiative is uniformly having a positive contribution to affordability of course materials. The concerns raised over resources that have been included in the IPM that are not being used mean that while students may be saving money off the list price of a resource, they also may not be getting value out of the resource. As well, with the IPM’s disruption of existing textbook economies (e.g. buying used and reselling, buying older editions of a textbook, buying online), a reduction off of list price might not prove to be overall more affordable for students.

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Digital Textbooks in a Public College Context Copyright © by Jonathan Weber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.

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