Students pass on electronic textbooks.

Same story covered over at CNN as well.

Now maybe the publishers will stop messing around with inaccessible digital formats and start listening to our needs a bit more. However, this could go the opposite direction with publishers making the case that they tried to go digital and it just didn't work out. Though, as this article points out, these "firts phase" attempts at digitizing textbooks fell flat partly because the materials were not as academically accessible as the real thing. More than anything it is the darn DRM encryption that makes them so user un-friendly.

I hope the publishers do move forward and get to know the tech savvy market that needs more than mere pages on screen to make it worth their while. And along the way it wouldn't hurt to build in accessibility so that we don't have to, quite literally in some cases, rewrite their books so that our students can use them to learn.