We are on the cusp of a change in education: the move from printed to electronic textbooks. Today iris simply too difficult to locate electronic copies of the books being chosen by faculty. It isn’t worth the effort, given the slight saving in price. I speak from the perspective of a parent, buying textbooks for my son. I can’t find them all in electronic form. I don’t. Need anything too fancy: a static PDF version will do. Our goal is to put his textbooks on his iPad. In the fall semester I was able to buy two of the books as eTexts. This semester it is harder, since I didn’t have as much time to look: two of his classes didn’t list the adopted textbooks as of the first day of class.

A great deal of change is evident in the eTextbook field. The article in the Chronicle talks about an Internet2 project to purchase electronic textbooks in bulk and have the institution provide them directly to the students. Only one publisher is participating. In an event tomorrow, Apple is going to announce new software to make it easy to create eTextbooks. Apple’s goal is to make eTexts (on iPads) the standard mode of textbook delivery in K-12 and perhaps higher education. Every publisher provides eText versions of its texts. The large bookstores, particularly B&N and Follett, have their own eText systems. And there are a number of companies set up just to digitize, enhance, and distribute eTextbooks. So change is in the air. Depending on which of these changes succeed, the future will look different, but the future is likely to contain eTextbooks rather then printed ones.