Plugged-in College Students Still Favor Old-School Textbooks

For a plugged-in generation, college kids have old-school tastes in textbooks. Even as more publishers offer the choice of buying eBooks for classes, students would rather lug around printed textbooks. “We have found that digital textbooks are still not as popular with students,” said Charles Schmidt, spokesman for the National Association of College Stores.

While the price of eBooks can be 60 percent to 70 percent of the paper version, a NACS poll found that 74 percent of students still want print.

That’s because most eBooks are simply PDF files of the print book, and renting the paper version is still cheaper