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The Book Store goes digital

Earlier this month, The Book Store at Western announced their partnership with Google Books—a bond that would allow the distribution of commercial e-books to students within the university. Available on The Book Store’s website, the digital books are an attempt to modernize course materials.

“We see this as a benefit—this is providing course materials to students in every available form, and that’s our main objective here,” says Steve Alb, director of The Book Store. “If students want [textbooks] in a book form, we have it. If they want it in an e-book form, we can make sure they have access to it.”

So what makes this technology any different than purchasing these books for your Kindle e-reader? According to Alb, these digital books are cloud-based, so they don’t exist in your device, but on Google’s server database.

“With Amazon you have to have the Kindle, so if it breaks, gets lost or gets stolen, you can’t access your materials from anywhere else,” he explains. “The beauty of the Google platform that we’re working with is you can read them on your laptop in your room, on your iPad in class, or on your iPhone or BlackBerry. Once you make the purchase, you can have it on all of your devices.”

Partnering during Google Books’ Canadian launch has other potential benefits as well.

“This gives us the opportunity down the road to bring Western writers and authors into the Google database,” Alb adds. “If there are self-published authors on campus, we have the partnership now to have them listed on Google Books. That’s what we’re hoping to provide to our community here, to open those doors while providing the resources.”

Although e-book prices are generally lower than regular textbooks, The Book Store has no control over the costs. Alb also notes that although there are hundreds of thousands of titles accessible so far, a lot of required course materials have not been made available yet.

“It’s a complicated thing on a campus like this where there are so many different platforms and devices,” he says. “We’re just working hard to find the right solution for everybody and we think this is a step in the right direction.”

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