The Digital Reader

From the announcement:

Follett Higher Education Group today announced a new program to address the rising costs of education by offering thousands of digital college textbook titles to students and faculty on a free-trial basis.The Try Now, Buy Later 2010 program is available exclusively through Follett’s new CaféScribe® eBook platform, which is an online social networking site that makes it easy to evaluate, download and use digital textbooks. By visiting www.cafescribe.com, students and professors can download and use, for seven days, more than 5,000 titles for free.

Once downloaded, CaféScribe provides students the ability to read, search, highlight, bookmark and annotate the e-textbooks, as well as share notes and discuss topics with peers in their classroom and with students around the world.

After the trial period, the student (or professor) can purchase the title at a 30 to 50 percent savings over the cost of a traditional textbook. All of the annotations made in the digital textbook during the trial period remain intact, and unlike other e-textbook sources, the digital textbook is the user’s to keep.