“the average price of a textbook is $75 to $100”
There’s a big problem, right there. Ain’t no free market in textbooks. No, sir.
We just found out our local CA grade school will have laptops for all 3 and 4 grade students next year.
This may be replacing the test books, but they won’t be able to take them home.
I can’t imagine this is cheaper than books. Trying to keep 100’s of laptops operting with 8 year olds driving them..that will take manpower.
He may trigger the beginning of the same type of plague that beset the music industry with the advent of MP3s.
In the book world you could see hundreds of thousands of students NOT BUYING text books because they can FREELY get a "File" copy of the text book in some popular file format such as PDF, etc. from a friend, BitTorrent site, etc.
You said — Theres a big problem, right there. Aint no free market in textbooks. No, sir.
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Well, that’s true — but by not going “hardware” with books and only going “software” (so to speak), you can save a lot of money. So, it’s not free, but it might cut the costs in half.
The problem is that they buy textbooks every year. And they are almost contiuously “updated”. The truth is, many textbooks could and should be used for a decade. Math? Literature? English?? History?? Basic Science?? Geography??
A decent supply, of decent books, should not be an annual or nearly annual purchase.