In many agricultural universities and colleges in the developing world, students do not have adequate access to textbooks for their courses, and often have to wait in long lines at library reserve desks to borrow the few available copies of the textbook. In some cases even the professor must use the library’s copy to prepare his or her lectures, although the available copies are often seriously out of date. Indian universities have addressed this problem to some extent through textbook “rental” centers, which collect a small fee from students for the use of a text for the semester. Applying this model in the electronic environment offers the potential to create digital collections of textbooks which could be made available for a small fee per student. Two types of texts could be added to this collection: 1) textbooks owned and distributed by publishers in electronic form where rights and fees have been negotiated; and 2) open access wikibook content developed by agricultural faculty, students and extension staff. Textbooks in these collections would be distributed to students either on inexpensive laptops (note: partnering with the One Laptop per Child program is one possible model), or content and delivery developed in conjunction with one of the new e-book reader development efforts, e.g. SONY Reader.