South Korea has mandated that all schools will start relying on digital textbooks by the year 2015. At this point, there are still questions about which format digital textbooks will take and which device students will use to read these digital textbooks, but the future is clear. Printed books are on their way out.
The problem is that information changes rapidly and buying, storing, and using obsolete printed textbooks is simply a waste of time and resources. In the United States, many textbook publishers follow the lead of California and Texas, two o the biggest state textbook buyers in the country. To save printing costs, other state schools purchase textbooks that Texas and California have approved.
With digital textbooks, the whole textbook publishing business model disappears overnight. It will cost just as much to buy a textbook approved by Texas or California as it will to print and purchase a different textbook altogether. This will allow schools to choose the textbooks based on need and not price alone. This will also force textbook publishers to cater to more markets than just Texas and California.
More importantly, textbooks are obsolete the second they’re printed, so switching to digital textbooks provides a simple way to dump obsolete textbooks nad replace them with newer ones. Naturally, textbook publishers will wnat to charge full price for replacement textbooks, but if other publishers get into the textbook market, they can steal away the traditional textbook publisher’s market by offering less expensive updates to existing digital textbooks.
Digital textbooks are simply the future and the teachers and students who resist this technological change will simply fall further behind. In the United States, expect inner city schools to continue wasting money on printed textbooks and wind up with broken or stolen digital textbook electronic readers. Technology alone may not save education, but it can help by eliminating obsolete printed textbooks that nobody needs to store any more.
