Choosing the Best E-Book Vendor for Kaplan University

Kaplan University moved to primarily electronic texts between 2009 and 2011. In 2012, the presenters began a pilot with three vendors to test student and faculty satisfaction and the percentage of text availability and online course integration for more than 5,000 students over a six-month period, with rolling pilots occurring month to month. Feature functionality for each of the three digital book vendor formats was also compared for user preference. The presenters will share the criteria used to select vendors and preliminary results from the pilot, as well as considerations for those who wish to engage in a similar pilot.

Learning Objectives:
* Learn about the different relationships textbook publishers have with the vendors who provide consistent feature functionality over "flat" PDFs provided by many publishers
* Learn how to estimate cost savings to students in moving to e-textbooks
* Learn the operational considerations to implement a large-scale university e-textbook project
* Learn the results of a comparison study of three major digital book vendors (VitalSource, Direct Digital, CourseSmart)