This fall, Penn State is offering a cheaper solution to the expensive textbook problem, and professors are jumping on board.

Penn State Bookstore general manager Tom Bauer said the bookstore has taken initiative to make textbooks cheaper by offering e-textbooks to their customers this fall.

"You buy the code and then go online and order the [electronic] books," Bauer said, adding that they have the same information as a hard copy would. Although they are cheaper, one drawback, he said, is that the e-textbooks cannot be bought back by the bookstore or swapped with friends.

"Whether or not it will catch on remains to be seen," Bauer said.

Bookstore Assistant Manager Tom Fankhauser said this is the first semester the bookstore has marketed the e-textbooks as an option. The bookstore has about 40 textbooks available in the electronic versions, including e-books for Chem 011 (Introductory Chemistry) and Finance 100 (Introduction to Finance), he said.

For some professors, having no textbook at all is the simplest solution to the high cost of textbooks.

"For me it's just really a no-brainer," Paul Begley, graduate professor of educational leadership, said. He added that a great deal of the resources he uses for teaching are conference papers, which are increasingly available online, and journal articles, many of which can be accessed through the university libraries.

"Textbooks are getting expensive," Begley said. He added that professors should try and be sensitive to the financial pressures students face.

If more professors knew how easy it was to make e-textbooks available, more of them would offer their students electronic resources, he said.

Communications Professor Matthew McAllister was also frustrated in his search for an appropriate textbook, so he decided to post his readings for his Comm 411 (Cultural Aspects of the Mass Media) class on the Angel Course Management System.

"I wanted to choose readings that would best complement what I wanted to do in the class," McAllister said.

He said the nature of the textbook market is such that it is hard to find a good textbook for some upper-level classes. For Comm 411, McAllister assigns research-based readings. He explained that doing this can be difficult to pull off because there is no textbook where overarching themes are explained, leaving the job of connecting the dots solely to the instructor.

Gerald Le Tendre, a professor of educational theory and policy, is working to introduce podcasting of lecture material for EDTHP 115 (Education in American Society).

"We are developing a lot of new supporting material, including Web-based material," Le Tendre said about the class.

Le Tendre said the podcasting idea came about at the request of students. He added that the text version of the podcasts will also be available online.

Penn State has long been at the forefront in utilizing online resources, said Chris Holobar, course reserves supervisor at Pattee and Paterno library, citing electronic reserves and the use of academic databases such as LexisNexis and ProQuest.

Holobar estimated 6,000 to 7,000 University Park professors use the library's electronic reserves a year. He added that the use of electronic reserve has grown considerably in the last five years.

Holobar said the university libraries are now looking at e-textbooks as a tool for students, and that the libraries already have access to some e-book providers.