Change was the theme of this year’s 88th annual National Association of College Stores meeting and Campus Market Expo at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, which ended Tuesday. “If we don’t change, we will not be viable. It needs to be significant change in a significant way,” said Donald “Buz” Moser, executive director of business services for Wake Forest University Stores in Winston-Salem, N.C., at a symposium for campus administrators. Nowhere is change more evident than the NACS’s digital initiative.

At a digital update held at the show, Mark Nelson, CIO of NACS and v-p of NACS Media Solutions, discussed the inroads digital has made on the college market. “In the past the challenge was what stores ought to be doing,” he said. “The question is no longer about print versus digital. Digital has arrived.” To emphasize his point he noted that in October 8% of college students had an e-reader or an iPad. By the fall 2011 those numbers are expected to double, and could possibly rise to 20%. Given that over half of textbook units were purchased online in 2010, Nelson projected that three-quarters of sales could be online by 2014. Companies like Chegg, a game changer in textbook rental, are getting into the device and software component. Osman Rashid, founding CEO of Chegg, is cofounder and CEO of KNO, a tablet developed specifically for textbooks.

“Our business is not selling books,” said Nelson. “It’s providing students with the educational resources they need.” As part of that effort NACS will begin testing the components, including routing and royalty collection, for a regional print-on-demand system starting next week. At least one regional will go live this summer, although Nelson declined to name who that partner will be. NACS has agreements from publishers and content from schools for the test. The goal is to work towards a 48 hour turn-around for printing and delivering course material. Through its NACSCORP subsidiary, NACS has long offered POD on a national level in conjunction with Lightning Source. And nearly two dozen collegiate stores provide POD services to their campuses using the Espresso Book Machines.

Last April NACS developed a pilot program with 20 campus stores and Flat World Knowledge, publisher of commercial open source textbooks. Although only three (two with EBMs and one with an HP Raptor) were able to execute it, the organization is continuing to discuss ways to build on a Flat World partnership. NACS is also working with Canadian Campus Retail Associates on a digital content platform that offers a low-tech, turnkey method to provide students with access to the free e-books used in classrooms. About 115 stores, 75 in the U.S., are currently participating and offer 200 public domain titles in cleaned up PDF.

While e-books continue to garner attention, the market to rent physical textbooks online continues to heat up. Follett Higher Education Group used CAMEX to announce a new online affiliate textbook rental solution for independently managed college bookstores. The program, which will debut in the fall, offers competitive rental prices and bookstore commissions as well as an online platform that will enable stores to implement branded marketing campaigns and customize their online storefronts, including store maps and hours. Students will be able to search rentable textbooks by title and course.