You've paid your tuition and the room and board bill, and maybe you'll have some money left for gas. Oops, no: You still have to lay out hundreds for textbooks.

Electronic textbooks, or eTexts, promise to cut those costs, while adding features that go beyond printed books. And by the way, an iPad in your backpack weighs a lot less than half a dozen fat textbooks. Beginning this spring, Cornell will launch a pilot program to test eTexts in four courses, involving about 1,000 students.

"This comes at a good time for Cornell, and there is a lot of interest on campus," said Clare Van Den Blink, acting director of Academic Technology Services in Cornell Information Technologies. Several faculty members are already experimenting with various forms of eTexts, she explained. "In the eBook world there are a lot of changes, and this is a chance to identify an optimal approach for the university," she said.

Along with Cornell, the pilot project involves Ohio State University and the Universities of California-Berkeley, Minnesota, Virginia and Wisconsin, and follows in the footsteps of trials done at Indiana University. Business arrangements with the software supplier and with McGraw-Hill, which will supply the textbooks, were made by the Net+ division of the national research network Internet2. The group marshals the buying power of a large group of institutions to negotiate opportunities for higher education.

"Through this pilot, Cornell is exploring how new digital publishing models could be advantageous to our students and potentially lower textbook costs. This pilot is timely, will build on faculty experience and will explore how new publishing models and technologies can be leveraged for student learning," said Ted Dodds, vice president for information technologies.

The project will include ongoing research to see how students use and react to the new tools. "At the conclusion of the pilot we will have some recommended next steps," Van Den Blink said. Future cost savings for students will probably be highly variable, she said, depending on the publisher.

The pilot includes courses in physics, archaeology, behavioral research data analysis and business ethics. Two are very large lecture courses.

In return for serving as guinea pigs, the students will receive free eTexts. They will use software called Courseload, which allows users to add annotations -- either highlighting text or attaching sticky notes -- and link to outside sources, and share all their additions with their study groups. Instructors also may add annotations and links, and students can use the software to submit questions to instructors. The Web-based system works with any browser that supports the HTML5 standard, including tablets and smartphones, and has been tested so far on Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 4, Safari 4 and Google Chrome 11 and later versions. The eTexts and associated services will be deployed through the Blackboard course management system.

Along with commercial textbooks, faculty members may use the system to distribute their own materials and royalty-free open courseware such as class notes or other study guides. Plan on fewer trips to the copy center.

And when it's all over, next year's students get a clean copy that's not filled with yellow highlighting of what someone else thought was important.