I <3 digital It's kind of ironic that eLearning is something that one can do from anywhere. My day job is Director of Online Education for Virginia International University , but I don't get out of the office much — hardly ever, in fact. This week was an exception, because I flew to Orlando to attend the "Developing a Digital Textbook Strategy for Your Campus Symposium" hosted by the Florida Distance Learning Consortium .

I was interested in it for two reasons. One was on a professional level, in that VIU still offers all of its textbooks the old fashioned way, where students are told what the required textbooks for their courses are, and then they're the ones who go out and get physical copies of them, whether through the bookstore, or off Amazon.com or a similar bookseller. And there's nothing inherently wrong with this, although there are a few drawbacks, chief among them the expense and the amount of time it can take a student to get that book, especially when they've picked up a course at the end of the add/drop period. For accelerated eLearning courses, that can mean the student doesn't have the book for the first quarter of the course, which is hardly ideal.

This symposium was especially interesting because it had a number of executives from major textbook publishers on a panel being grilled by a moderator who clearly thought little of their business model and wasn't afraid to make it known. I suppose that's not what a panel moderator is supposed to do, but it was pretty entertaining, especially for a dry academic conference setting. The publishers did offer some pretty useful information, though, including the following, at least as I understood them.

The first thing is that they're not really interested in a conversation that is only about price. They know they can't avoid the issue, but they want to bundle other issues into the conversation to make things easier — sort of like how they bundle multimedia "supplements" that few people use with their textbooks to make the prices seem less unreasonable.

More directly, they recognize a major difference between a probabilistic sales model, and a deterministic sales model. These are pretty big words, but they came up again and again during this event. A probabilistic sales model is one like my institution's, where the textbook is assigned, but students are free to obtain it (or not) in any way they can. The publishers don't like this model, because it means far fewer sales for them. They get nothing from textbooks that a student gets used, or rents from a third party, or pirates, or just plain never gets at all. What they like a lot better is a deterministic model, where a student is required to get the textbook as part of enrolling in the course. The publishers' sales numbers are way up in this model.

So, of course they like that, right? But what they said is that in return. if they know they'll make those sales, that can help them really cut schools and students a break when it comes to prices. No one made any commitments, but it seems like as much as 60% off was a possibility in that sort of situation. Under those circumstances might it make sense for institutions to try to work out deals with the publishers? Well, sort of. But I'll expand on this tomorrow, because there's another character in this movie who hasn't gotten on screen yet....