I was discussing college costs with an aggrieved parent the other day. After the usual, "Wow isn't college expensive", discussion we moved on to "Why do text books cost so much". I asked the question, 'Why aren't all text books on line?" Plenty of storage on the Internet to hold these books that have very little value other then in taking a class. Very few text books are worth being long term reference books. You would either pay a fee associated with the course or buy access rights to the book online. All the information would be online and if you really needed a hard copy of a couple pages, that is what a printer is for. Its not like you couldn't take the book to a copier now so I don't see the difference in copyright protection.
In our discussion, the point came up of security. The fear of the book publisher is that students would share names and passwords to save money. What really needs to happen with the Internet, is that there is no more anonymous access to the web. That's the big problem with spammers and pornographers. They can get on the web anonymously and cause all kinds of havoc. Using an identity method such as finger print or retinal scanning could be used to identify the individual.
I-books (my coin of phrase) would be less expensive and a boon to the environment. Less trees, bleaching and ink chemistry is good for the world. I think text books would be an ideal start to ridding us of another worthless college expense. What do you think? Just click the orange comment word below and let me know.
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