There is one over riding reason why physical textbooks are far superior to etexts, and that is ownership. It seems as if all textbook publishers are attempting to turn ownership of a textbook into purchasing mere temporary access to the textbook as a service. No one wants to keep paying a fee for essentially the same product over and over again. People are already getting reamed out from ISPs with cell phone billing and internet costs. It's not enough to charge a customer once for a product, but we're being force into consistently paying for the same object more than once, isn't this tantamount to double, triple, and etc billing? Textbooks are purchased as reference material as well. How can one reference what they no longer own? Supporting textbooks as a service will also cause an increase in cracking of whatever encryption strategies that companies employ. Companies will dislike this of course, they don't like losing out on even 1% of product use. Thus companies will begin employing drama (ie:DRM) like methods that become more and more unwieldy for the user base. Just look at Windows, there are numerous problems with product activations. I myself have had problems activating Windows with product keys that I purchased. When complexity is added to a given system entropy must also increase as well. What happens when such entropy affects a student studying for an exam and they can no longer access an extext, or their notes attached to the etext get deleted?

Etexts are a great idea for sure, but companies have never shown themselves to be trustworthy where trust is a pre requisite for the delivery of products. Sure they wish to earn exactly what they made with the physical books. But guess what they always want more, the concept of good corporate citizen just doesn't exist. As an example Adobe is switching to software as a service model. Many people only want to pay once for a product and use the software for a few years until they are willing to buy an updated version. Now the customer base is being forced into paying a yearly prescription for access. They own nothing, the company owns everything. If the user loses their job, they no longer have access once the prescription period expires. Similar models are now being floated for operating systems. Profit margins will only grow, but that will also increase the indebtedness of its customers. Supporting a market where regulation doesn't really exist will permit that market to abuse the customer. Many students will go out of their way to pay for physical textbooks, and that represents a new cost increase of anywhere from $300+ to perhaps $700-$800. One last point, students are well known for reselling their used textbooks as a source of needed income, but you cannot resell what you no longer have access to. Soon there will be no such thing as used textbooks, the industry will increase their profits on the back of an already cash strapped student population. Governments will have no choice but to eventually increase funding to students, and more money required will come from taxes, so taxes must also increase, or the public debt will grow, most likely some people will opt out of attending university or college. This seems like an interesting development for the textbook industry as well. They'll receive money from the school, and then they'll receive money from the students themselves from two different reasons. Interesting how that one works out for them. I highly doubt this will increase the numbers of students attenting Athabasca University, in fact from reading various student reactions quite the opposite situation seems far more plausible. I support individual ownership of what I purchase.