Another view of e-textbooks

California's governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has announced a policy of offering electronic textbooks to students. He suggested that this would save the state millions of dollars because the books would be free, although it's not clear how the content would be produced unless people were paid to write it. Pilot programs in various states have tried to study how students react to e-textbooks and the results, according to the Wall Street Journal, are mixed. Cost for commercially produced e-books are approximately the same as the costs for print versions, and publishers would like to keep it this way. Some students don't like reading on a screen and some complain they are unable to take notes or skip around to find specific content. Apparently the choice of how to read, as well as what to read, is very personal and schools and libraries will be experimenting for years to find a way of serving the greatest number of students. In this time of budget woes, it may not be easy to change a system even one that is as expensive as our current textbook market is.