I searched for "e-textbooks" on LibWorm and it gave me highly relevant hits, 954 of them. Most I'd read already, since I'd already set up "Inside Higher Ed", "LISNews", and "The Kept-Up Academic Librarian" in my Google Reader subscriptions. When I narrowed the search using "exact phrase", that dropped to 65 records returned. Not as good but, of course, that's to be expected since there's no standardized way to refer to "electronic textbooks" yet. I favor the hyphen, since just putting the "e" in front of textbooks looks like a typo. Ditto for e-books, e-mail, etc., but it's all over the place out there in the media.
I checked out the subject "Ebooks", since there wasn't one specifically on e-textbooks. Absolute ton of hits, 333 pages of them. There's also a Feed Category of "Academic Libraries" with some interesting articles. Funny though how there are a bunch of foreign-language articles and I don't see a quick way to narrow to English-language only.
The LibWorm Tag Cloud is a fun visual way to shuffle through the deck, but again e-textbooks aren't listed, though textbooks are in the Big Cloud. The topic is peripheral to libraries per se, but still one that academic librarians need to be aware of, especially with the tough economic times and its impact on state funding for university libraries. (I'm thinking about the recent announcement "Schwarzenegger's Push for Digital Textbooks" that's for K-12, but you know this will affect the higher ed level eventually, especially with the impact on textbook publishers.) I like the Storm Cloud version of the tags—looks kind of like the fat cumulus clouds that are floating through Texas this weekend.
Interesting tool, good quality hits, I'll add it to my del.icio.us links.
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