With today's horrible school funds, many kids have to lug books around for EVERY class. For some people, that's 6 books- about 25-30lbs. That's really really bad...
So what about (and I've heard about this being done in certain places.) giving the kids a flash drive with all their course material that they could use at school, and at home. The flash drives cost about $5, which would save schools from buying hundreds (maybe even thousands) of $50-$100 books.
And for schools that don't have the computers for the kids, how 'bout something like the Amazon Kindle, only WAY less expensive, and only for the course material. The flash drive could even follow the kid all through the schooling years, so that they don't need to buy flash drives for each kid each year. They could just swap the info on it. When the curriculum changes, all the school has to do is get one book, and put a digitized copy on the flash drives.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
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It is, of course, the logical way to go and perhaps will be possible once the intricate current systems of wringing as much cash out of the system by book publishers and creators of original material resign themselves to a new system of compensation. That will take time and a lot of public clamor.
Yeah, I agree with sand. There's just too much profit in selling tome of pictures that are unnecessary.
Sand and hrench have a point, but I think this may come to pass anyway. I suspect the ebook industry will grow quickly in a few years. That is, many ebooks will be published with no hard copies printed at all. This will be encouraged by the proliferation of ebook readers like the Kindle. Once that happens, it will be just a matter of time before it spreads to other book users, like schools. I don't expect this to happen in the next couple of years, but technology moves fast in the US. If one school adopts it and saves a lot of money, it's sure to become popular fast.
The schools will still have to pay for each "copy" the students get, but it would be cheaper than hard copies. The price would need to be low enough to compensate for the fact that hard copy textbooks can be reused for years by different students. One advantage of selling to schools is that they're less like to cheat and use pirated copies than ordinary consumers. BTW, your idea is related to this one.
i gave a no-opinion for the reason that books are hardcopy and not subject to "revisionism" at the whim of either local or federal authorities. i think of school-sanctioned versions of Hucklberry Finn without the n-word or the Bible without the controversial or X-rated parts. History and Science books would likewise be subject to instant censorship or "abrigement." a tad to big brothery for me. the reason i did not vote negative is that the cost savings would be enormous. The idea is probably a good one that would need a number of safegaurds in place first.
If the school has computer, what's the point of the flashdrive ? Files can be stored on the network and accessed from home through a VPN. Editors can still get their money and no tree will need to be taken down. The real problem here is to teach the kids to write with a real pen when things are ten times faster with a keyboard.