This report outlines economic components that will eventually contribute to large models of electronic text services in institutions of higher education, and provides a simple and practical assessment of economic issues associated with electronic text for college administrators, faculty, and planners. This assessment constitutes a layman's guide to equipment costs, staffing, production timetables, and cost recovery options for a range of electronic text services. Readers can build a model for services in a particular higher education environment by using the data provided here and reworking them in the context of a specific higher education institution. The report is based on several sources of data, including a survey of electronic text managers in the commercial and nonprofit sections; a survey of college students in three states dealing with their media habits, access to personal computers, and plans to purchase new technologies in the near future; an aggregation of electronic text industry cost and pricing data; and a secondary analysis of survey data collected by other researchers on the uses of new technologies in colleges. (THC)