In a Digital Future, Are Textbooks History?

A few years back, while buying a science textbook for my daughter's high school chemistry class, I noticed that her $180 textbook also came in a relatively cheaper electronic version. My wife, who loves her Kindle, had suggested that we solve the problem of lugging too many heavy textbooks and save some money by buying digital textbooks.   Are we are at the leading edge of a fundamental change in educational technology?

In the United States, textbooks are a $14 billion market, about evenly divided between the K-12 segment and the college segment.  This market is on the verge of being disrupted.  The web and digital media disintermediate knowledge and shatter historical monopolies on information, communication, and learning. They are a classic example of what Clayton Christensen, currently dean of the Harvard Business School, termed "disruptive technology" in his prescient first book, The Innovator's Dilemma.

Schools and schooling are moving online. More schools and increasing numbers of teacher are creating their own instructional materials.  They make PowerPoint presentations, podcasts, and YouTube videos and post them to the web. Neeru Khosla's CK-12 Foundation, which creates digital textbooks from free, digital media, has submitted several of its "flexbooks" for adoption by the state of California, which the department of education hopes might save millions of dollars. 

I don’t use textbooks.  All my lessons are hands-on, inquiry science where we are either doing an experiment or reflecting on and creating meaning for an experiment that we have just done.  We experiment, we talk, we write.  I tell my students that our textbook is the one they create in their science notebooks. 

In the past, I kept some sample textbooks to look something up.  Now I use trusted sites on the web to look things up.  For ideas, I might use the web or some creative books, such as Culinary Reactions, a great book on food chemistry by Simon Field, to plan a lesson.  But no textbooks.  Move over McGraw-Hill and give Gutenberg the news.