Walter Hutchens’ Blog

PC Magazine has an interesting story, High School Trades Textbooks for iBooks, about a high school that has decided to punt traditional bound textbooks in favor of content distributed electronically, for use on notebook computers to be supplied to each student.

I think this is great. I never had my life changed by a textbook, but globally networked personal computers do offer transformative possibilities—something so obvious it seems banal to mention it.

Give a kid a textbook and you bore him; give a kid a laptop and an internet connection and you’ve started something interesting.

Yes, they will probably spend a lot of time on email, IM, games and looking for porn. But they’ll also be tied into the world of knowledge in a dramatically better way. There is the risk the might encounter an online socio-path, and there needs to be some socialization without computer mediation and some physical education to try to assure an online life isn’t a child’s onlymeaningful life, but I can think of few advantages that traditional textbooks hold over digital content.

So, does this news item the herald the overthrow of the current model of textbook publishing? Is this the signal of a dramatic change that will be accomplished in the next few years? Will my daughter, now 4, be unfamiliar with paper textbooks in the same way she’ll be unfamiliar with music from vinyl or images from film?

I really doubt it. In fact, textbook publishers probably aren’t worried at all. I bet textbooks in paper form will be common for another 10-15 years at least, and textbook publishers, for better or worse, will probably be around indefinitely.

This is largely because textbook publishing is driven by lowest common denominators. Publisher seek the largest markets and the greatest efficiencies, and school districts seek the lowest costs and most effective ways to meet the needs of their masses of students. Practically speaking, this means big states like Texas and California drive the textbook publishing business, not small, affluent and progressive school districts that want to go all digital.

Right now, big states like Texas and California cannot afford to go all digital. Even if they had the dollars for laptops (say by using Linux-based machines or the $100 laptops some people hope to build), the human capital needed for a mass roll-out would be extraordinary. They’d need a lot of money to put networks in schools, add power outlets, provide tech support and train teachers. By contrast, a paper book that can be used for multiple years and requires no technical support is a good value proposition for a state worried about providing enormous numbers of free lunches and basic English lessons. A digital divide exists, and that means going all-digital in big markets isn’t likely in the near term.

Second, the current educational system does not foster ad hoc approaches, and most teachers (like most humans) are risk-averse and too busy to reinvent the world. In other words, most teachers (and their host institutions) will still want pre-packaged textbooks for a long time, even when they shift the distribution of such texts to a digital format. Somebody has to prepare those textbooks. Publishers are not printers–they’ll step up and offer digital editions of their current list of titles when there is sufficient demand (or when offering digital editions will help drive adoption of the paper editions).

In fact, not only are publishers still needed in a digital world, they might be able to increase their profits in one. With a switch to digital textbooks there will be savings on paper, printing and physical distribution. Spending less on these things, publishers probably won’t find their margins shrinking.

Also, textbook publishers now spend a lot of money sending copies out free “review copies” that they hope will lead to adoption of their books by some teacher or program. Going digital with review copies alone could save a good bit, I imagine.

However, producing digital editions of existing or new textbooks will impose additional costs. Publishers will not be able to simply hit “save as” and generate a digital edition from the work done to format a print edition.

Thus, I suspect digital editions may sell at a premium for some time, even with smaller physical production and distribution costs.

The school districts buying laptops can probably afford to pay some premium for digital editions (and probably should base their decision to go digital on things other than substantial cost-savings).

Still, even if you don’t eliminate textooks and their publishers and even if the costs are neutral or slightly increased, there are huge—I’d even say magical—advantages to going digital.

For starters, I’ve never seen a textbook that didn’t need both updating and corrections (typos, if not facts). Both will be easier in a digital format. “Editions” could become a matter of daily builds, not 5-year overhauls.

More importantly, a digital textbook is embedded in a digital world that offers interactive possibilities inconceivable with printed books and non-networked computers.

As a kid in public school I was always told not to write on my books. They would be used by another kid the next year, so marginal annotation and decorative contributions were not welcome. (Looking at the way I now desecrate things I read, I wonder how I ever managed!) In contrast, electronic textbooks not only can avoid the problem of “Jenny loves Greg” defacing a text but can also enable the sharing of more teacher and student annotations.

Also, if a student has both a digital text and an Internet connection, broadening a discussion to other works and points of view will be much easier. In other words, the singular, authoritative voice of the textbook is undermined. This is a good thing, and I don’t mean in some post modernist lit crit sense. I mean in a very practical way the textbook pablum can be challenged and enriched. A curious or smart-ass student wanting to argue with the textbook writers is only a few clicks away from content the textbook left out (and leaving stuff out is what textbook writers do, by definition).

In conclusion, I don’t think textbooks will be foreign to my daughter. She’ll probably have both digital and printed ones, and, alas, they will probably continue to be a dead spot in her educational world—dead to a greater or lesser extent depending mainly on her teachers. Textbooks and their publishers will likely be around for her whole educational life. But thankfully she’ll have something better than textbooks—access to a personal, networked computer. She’ll be able to go beyond and around her textbooks.

This marginalization of textbooks should occur even if she doesn’t go to an enlightened school that has totally jettisoned all those heavy, interactively flat printed books. If she does go to such a school, all the better.