Why Can't Ebooks Disrupt The Lucrative College Textbook Business?

The promise of electronic text has been largely unrealized in academia, where students still pay thousands for books that lose most of their value within months. Here's why.

College students today stream movies from Netflix, queue up music on Spotify, and order late-night snacks on Seamless. But when it comes to buying textbooks, many students are still doing things the old-fashioned way: buying pricy paper copies from the campus bookstore at the start of the semester, then selling them back for a fraction of the purchase price when classes are done.