1. $49 for a digital textbook? Really? I am someone who understands the publishing world reasonably well (written four books, former school librarian, voracious reader on the subject), so I do get that there is a significant cost involved. It’s not $49 each. It can’t be. Why? Here’s one good reason. I actually had a conversation with a different publishing company and they brought up the quality issue. Absolutely what they do is of higher quality than that link. If that was the only choice, perhaps that argument would win. The economy is swirling the drain. Free is free.
2. Paying for digital textbooks over x number of years? Really? That is a model that never made sense (and which was tied to textbook adoptions). It’s unclear to me that California will do textbook adoptions in the same way again (adoptions last seven years here). We will pay one time and be done with it (and I would encourage you to go back and take a look at #1).
3. You have to use publishing companies because you need textbooks. Guess what? You are no longer the only game in town. Groups of large school districts could easily band together and begin to create textbooks of their own.
4. A digital textbook is not the creation of a .pdf file and the slapping of it onto the Internet. Again, I can get that for free. Digital textbooks should have video, audio, interactivity, and more. There are precious few examples of this out there.

If you have an interest in digital textbooks, and who doesn’t, then I would encourage you to check out the new Digital Textbooks Daily that I have set up over at http://paper.li. Using Twitter feeds, it pulls in information from all over the Internet about digital textbooks. Enjoy!

I regularly have several projects going on at the same time. One very cool and very secret project came to initial fruition today. My district, Fresno Unified School District, was selected to be one of four districts within California to be part of a pilot of iPads. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) and Apple are providing support for the pilot and converted an Algebra 1 textbook into a digital version.

This is a year-long pilot and in our district it includes four schools on two campuses. The pilot includes a research study paid for by HMH. It seems to present a unique opportunity to compare like with like.

You can read about it in the Fresno Bee here.

Out here in California our governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has started a Free Digital Textbook Initiative. The theory is that too much of our California budget is spent on the print version and this is certainly true. The results, thus far, are mixed.

Yes, an initial group of textbooks have been released. Some of the textbooks do a great job of meeting our state’s content standards and some are not particularly close. This is the issue. You can’t do free if free handicaps the students.

Clearly, I am  looking at this because it has come up in my day job. It is certainly intriguing, but a little problematic as well. Out here we have the Williams Settlement which requires us to make sure all students have a textbook checked out specifically to them (because we didn’t always do a good job of that and now we need to deal with the fall-out). If you use digital textbooks, there are similar rules. You can either:

• provide the student with the electronic equipment necessary to view the digital version; or
• provide the student with a print-out of the digital version.

Anyone out there work for a school or a district that used digital textbooks, free or commercial, in a meaningful way? It would be helpful to see where others have gone.