The case for digital texts is pretty overwhelming. Ask the parent of any young student carrying a 50 lb. backpack, or one paying $150 for a single text, and the answer is clear. Ask any teacher who is affected by the tyranny of the text, and one wonders why this transition is not happening more quickly. Ask the directors of a textbook company, and things become a bit more complicated. Unfortunately, without the cooperation of textbook companies, this evolution will take significantly longer.
I want to be careful to be fair here. Companies who see their current market threatened will work to protect their model. Sometimes this takes the path of obstruction to progress, buggy whip makers trying to kill progress on the automobile. However, some of the challenges to digital texts are real, and until a clear path is found, progress will be sluggish at best. I’m going to look at two challenges in this post, distribution model and compensation to authors.
In order to have digital texts that are equal to their paper counterparts, students must have universal access to these texts. Until a school moves to a 1:1 model, therefore, digital textbooks are not practical. Though the move to 1:1 seems inevitable, at least at the secondary level, the financial and networking challenges put this goal much farther down the road than it should be. Even when students have this universal access, there will not be a single model. Schools now are embracing laptops, laptop tablets, pure tablets, netbooks, and electronic readers, so any electronic text will have to work on multiple platforms.
Beyond this is the bigger questions of distribution. I’m certain up to a few years ago most companies thought that CD or DVD offered the answer. Students could purchase discs which would have the text and live links to further resources on the Internet. However, the portable optical storage device seems to be dying as quickly as the floppy disc did. This leaves two options (at least) downloadable texts that stay on the the drive and cloud-based texts accessed online. Each of these requires Internet access which again is challenged by current realities. Also, digital content is by its nature infinitely reproducible, so the challenges of piracy are greater. Probably schools will have to charge or pay a fee per student, to give that student access to the book for a limited time, but control will be difficult.
Connected to this is the financial model. Everyone in education laments the inflated price of textbooks, and there is general agreement that an electronic text should combat this. However, one thing that is forgotten is that the only costs removed from the digital text is publishing and physical distribution. Authors, editors, and publishers will still be needed, and need to be fairly compensated. So while costs should drop, digital texts will not (and should not) be free. However, just as digital distribution of music or video has cut the income of record or film companies, digital texts will call for a restructuring and shrinking of the textbook publishers. Transitional pains of a major industry (which has major influence in the whole world of education…textbook publishers sponsor most education events) will slow the inevitable.
Digital texts are coming, but it won’t be an overnight transition, and there will be many growing pains.
As always, I welcome your comments.