I don't necessarily agree that huge numbers of students will break electronic devices. My twins went to a Catholic high school where every student was required to buy or lease a Mac that was used in virtually every class. They carried them back & forth to school in the back pack for 4 years. Neither of them broke the Mac and, in fact, both have the same Mac with them at college and they continue to work fine. They know of very few students who broke their Mac. Granted, the parents had financial responsibility if the kid broke it, and I doubt a public school could force the parents to pay for the electronic device broken by their kid.
Another issue: would the textbooks remain cheap ($14.99) if they weren't developed with the knowledge that if adopted by lots of districts, they could sell every student copy for $50 or more? Granted, perhaps a lot of that price goes to the printer, but I wonder if the profit/book will be high enough to get the quality that's needed.
Colleen
--- In iPad@yahoogroups.com, "David H. Bailey" <dhbailey52@...> wrote:
>
> On 1/26/2012 12:17 PM, pabitra saha wrote:
> >
> >
> > Old things do not vanish but just fade away.
> > Where did pagers or film based cameras go?
> > Horse drawn buggy is still there but it is a miniscule fraction of
> > transportation.
> > May be an Ibook reader costing less than $100 with full set of books
> > from K-12 will be cost effective.
>
> That's definitely true -- such a device, if it were actually to be
> produced and were actually indestructible at such a price, would be
> wonderful and would probably begin to make inroads into the
> paper-textbook world.
>
> Pagers are still widely used (I know a lot of doctors who still use
> them) and film cameras are still used by many professional
> photographers, but I get your point about how less common they are.
>
> I wonder if the text-book industry will go for such a device, however.
> A printed textbook which now costs the school district $50-$100 yet only
> costs $10 or less to print is a huge profit-engine. Electronic books
> which can be sold with the device for $100 will eat into that huge
> profit margin.
>
> Anything's possible and I certainly won't deny that your concept may
> well become reality. However I've seen how tough students are on
> textbooks, the paper kind that if dropped multiple times still continue
> to be legible, and I have yet to see any electronic device which can
> survive the same amount of rough handling and keep working.
>
> But they're a whole lot more reliable and able to take more kicks these
> days so they may one day actually be able to survive a 10th grade hall
> fight. :-)
>
>
> --
> David H. Bailey
> dhbailey@...
>
