"I envision a course Web page where the student will choose the citations on the Web page of the articles they want. That would generate a print command, charge their bursar bill and then they would stop by the nearest print center to pick that up," says James S. Lawrence, custom publishing manager at the Cornell Campus Store.

While CourseWeb is now designed for coursepacks rather than standard textbooks, Cornell is looking to innovate in textbooks as well.

One out of every 12 to 14 textbooks is sold out by the first day of class, providing the impetus for the second program, Lawrence says. The goal is to put the first two to three chapters of every textbook on the Web so that no assigned readings are ever unavailable.

"That's pretty dramatic given numbers of titles and faculty and student frustration levels," Lawrence says. "We think this will be a pretty powerful project that may come to fruition in the next semester."

With these two programs, coursepacks and textbooks could merge through electronic delivery, and if the sentiment of students has any impact, that level of change will soon be in the works.

And given that the players in the industry--from the Coop, to publishers and authors, to professors, to even the financial aid office--are either unable or unwilling to lessen the burden of textbook prices, using technology to give students more choice over what to read may be the only way to significantly lower the bill. --Sasha A. Haines-Stiles contributed to the reporting of this article.