Paying for digital textbooks

Governor Schwarzenegger's announcement that California schools will soon be using open source digital textbooks for science and math--and perhaps other subjects--was a welcome one to many teachers and librarians. The process by which schools and libraries can move to providing this material instead of paper books is still not clear. Digital material needs equipment to make it usable and school boards as well as library boards are notoriously stingy about buying enough computers and especially maintaining them well. It's not unusual to see a cluster of computers in a classroom and library in which half of the machines are "temporarily" unusable. The new Kindle and other electronic reading devices seem ideally suited to textbook use, but how will those stand up to repeated use by students year after year. It's important to look at the quality and cost of our textbooks, but librarians and teachers ought to be equally concerned with the quality and cost of the machines that give access to them.