My spring semester started today, complete with pouring rain and the typical syllabus overviews. It also came with the purchase of six textbooks for three classes, totally about $200. I know there are students out there who have to drop a lot more cash for their textbooks and for what?

So we can maybe read them the first few weeks and then forget about them? Or the opposite, and we read them and write all over them and utterly destroy them by the end of the semester? Not to mention lugging them back and forth every day. In this age of abundant technology, why aren’t all of our textbooks in the palm of our hands and free (or at least low cost)?

Luckily, five universities across the nation have joined a new program with the company Courseload, the Internet2 consortium and McGraw-Hill to try and make this dream a reality.

The University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Virginia and the University of Wisconsin have all signed on with Courseload’s pilot program to use eTextbooks instead of traditional textbooks.

The eText Pilot Trial Pack is based on a successful partnership between Courseload and Indiana University. Indiana University began the eText pilot model in 2009 with Courseload, signed a three-and-a-half year agreement to use the Courseload platform across all Indiana University campuses in 2011 and a growing number of the university’s courses offer eTexts instead of traditional textbooks today.

Under the pilot program, participating universities subsidize the Courseload platform as part of a research study on the effectiveness of digital textbooks, called eTexts, inside and outside the classroom.

This means that for students who attend universities that partner with Courseload, they can access eTexts on their tablet, smartphone or computer at no additional cost. Hooray!

Apart from the obvious money saving benefits, a digital textbook can do things traditional textbooks couldn’t even dream of, such as the eText annotation function.

The annotation function allows faculty members to share notes on certain reading sections with their students, and in turn, students can also share annotations with their peers and faculty members if they have a question or comment about the assignment.

According to Courseload, about 20 schools are implementing the program this term, with about 17,000 students accessing the eTexts. They, of course, hope to expand to more schools in the future.