Abstract Inflation-adjusted costs in higher education have risen for several decades. One component of increasing higher education cost comes from the rising cost of the college textbook. Indeed, responding to the rising cost of textbooks, students, parents, state legislatures, federal agencies, university bookstores and book publishers have made textbook cost a controversial issue on college campuses. Objective The main objective of this paper is to determine whether a custom professor-written online text can increase productivity and lower the cost of the textbook resource in introductory economics education. One way to demonstrate a productivity increase is to show a decrease in input cost while maintaining the quality of textbook services. Data/Methods We begin the paper by discussing the outlines of a theory of rising introductory textbook cost. We then describe a particular case of substituting a custom professor-written online text for a traditional textbook. We note how such a substitution can lessen the problems resulting in the high and rising cost of traditional texts. To provide a test of whether our innovation produced such a cost-reducing, productivity-increasing effect, we administered a satisfaction survey to two different sections of the course, which ran in the Fall 2005 and Spring 2006 semesters. The fall section was a regular in-person class, and the following spring section was online. Results We found that 78% of the students in the spring section and 86% of the students in the fall section agreed or strongly agreed that the online textbook was a valuable learning tool, with only 7% of the students in the spring section and 2% of the students in the fall section disagreeing or strongly disagreeing. This was a large increase from the response of students using a regular hard copy text in an earlier section of the course. Students' preference for an online text rather than a regular hard copy text was less strong when asked directly to compare the two alternatives, as 55% of the students in the spring section and 54% of the students in the fall section agreed or strongly agreed with the preference for an online text, while 20% of students in the spring section and 22% of the students in the fall section disagreed or strongly disagreed. If student opinion can be trusted as a measure of textbook quality, we conclude that our custom professor-written online text did not reduce textbook quality and possibly increased it. As the cost of obtaining the online version is half the cost of a standard "hard copy" text, fewer resources were expended on the textbook function. With the same (or better) quality and reduced cost, productivity in the course increased.