Gone digital

Anyone who's taken a college course knows textbooks come at a high cost.

A company called CourseSmart, backed by the biggest textbook publishers, wants to buck this trend by offering an electronic alternative to students.

For example, the paper version of one "Psychology" texbook costs $90 new, $70 used, and $55 in e-book form — still steep for an e-book, but less so than its hardback kin.

The Boston Globe found student reaction to e-textbooks to be generally positive.

Cost remains the most appealing trait. Students spend about $940 a year on textbooks on average.

But the deal between CourseSmart and the six publishers that control nearly 80 percent of the textbook market has college bookstores and other third-party distributors worried they are being cut out of the equation.

Then there is the matter of piracy. With the release of Amazon's e-book viewer Kindle, it was revealed that it is fairly easy to snag bestsellers on torrents.