Across the digital divide.

"There needs to be a critical mass of people who buy in print, to keep the economies of scale going."

Hm. I never thought about that side of it. I want paper books to continue to be available new, secondhand, and third hand, for those that want them, but my choice has been to buy all my new fiction (which isn't that much compared to some people) in ebook format, or to check "one time reads" out of the library. When I can find cheap epub editions, I'm also buying my favorite books as ebooks, even if I own (multiple) paper copies already because (much more than I anticipated I would) I love my ereader and carrying around 65 books with me at all times. After reading this post and the comments I had already decided to donate my nice editions of some of the books that I now own as ebooks to the library instead of selling them back.

But I think what some of the comments are getting at is that the change to ebooks for popular reading material is somewhat inevitable. And frankly I don't think equipping elementary school kids with ereaders which can be lost, broken, or stolen is going to work as a solution--I can't see them ever being cheap enough to be replaced non-trivially (not to mention the time involved in re-loading the ebooks every time one gets a new ereader). And I can't see parents saying, "Well, since you lost your ereader, you can't read anymore."

I don't read books on my laptop unless there is no other option. One of the things I like most about my ereader is its portability, and that it *feels* like a book in my hands.

But someone commented that there may not always be power to recharge an ereader--and I didn't think much about that either. I take my access to electricity for granted. But I live in an earthquake zone--what happens to my cell phone, laptop, and ereader if my power is out for several days, or if I have to evacuate, and cope with numerous people all trying to access the few electrical outlets that exist at one time? That won't be fun! And is, in the overall scope of that kind of a disaster, a very small matter at best. But I know I would go nuts without reading material, which makes me re-evaluate what should go in an earthquake evac kit.

And some people can't afford electricity...and libraries with free computer access are not within walking distance for many people, so their resources aren't available to all for that reason alone.

I think it is really hard for the "haves" to understand what it is like to be a "have not."

I'm a child of privilege. But I feel your post made me understand much better than anything else I've ever read what it would be like to to be that poor. So although it may indeed be very hard for the "haves" to understand what it is like to be a "have not," I think you've definitely made a dent in that here.

And frankly I don't think equipping elementary school kids with ereaders which can be lost, broken, or stolen is going to work as a solution--I can't see them ever being cheap enough to be replaced non-trivially

AGREED.

Here's a story:

When I was 15, in 1987, my calculator broke. We couldn't afford to replace it. My deskmate was kind enough to let me use her calculator once she had finished, but by the time we got to trigonometry, it was important to follow the instructions on how to use your calculator to do the exercises.

Consequence: I went from a solid B student with the occasional A, to a C student to C student with the occasional D.

Further consequence: I didn't go on to take any maths options in senior high, I did biology, which was the least maths based of the science options.

That's one piece of equipment, a piece that at that school in that year was considered standard and necessary. But there were kids like me who lost or broke theirs, and there was no safety net in place for us.

In early high school, I loved maths and chemistry. I didn't pursue them not because they were too hard, but because I was lacking a piece of background knowledge.

That's absolutely horrifying.

I am going to be a math teacher, and I am going to do everything I can, if I can, to make sure I have calculators available for my students to use. Because I find your story absolutely revolting, and I never want to watch a bright student spiral downwards over a stupid electronic.

I find it horrifying now, at the time it wasn't the most pressing of my worries. Which is probably what kids in a similar situation today would feel.

The electricity thing is a good point. When I taught in an urban high school with many students living in poverty, kids were constantly trying to charge their cell phones or mp3 players in my classroom. I'm sure some of that is simply teenagers exhibiting poor planning the night before and thus having batteries die at school, but some of it was probably due to not having another time in their day when they could sit next to an outlet and supervise their device recharging. I discouraged them from doing so in my classroom because of the theft potential, but I had kids doing it anyway pretty regularly. Sometimes I'd even find stuff hooked up to the USB ports on the "teacher computer" on my desk (we had computerized attendance and grading systems, and that computer was always kept password-locked, so they were definitely recharging stuff rather than trying to use it).

What I want to see if how k-12 textbook licensing ends up working for ebooks. We lost SO MANY textbooks to kids moving without warning or losing them (or, in some cases, deciding that they wanted a copy to keep at home in case they wanted to look at it later and telling us it was lost), and it's not like sending home a bill would result in us getting money for new copies. If the licensing worked such that you were buying x licenses and you could revoke them from one device and put them on another at will, my guess is that many schools like mine would have bought $50 e-book readers for all students because losing $50 when a student disappears or refuses to return their books is less than we lose now. I don't know how well that'd work in terms of them not being stolen, but theft of the bright yellow "school" graphing calculators stayed at reasonably manageable levels so I'm optimistic.

This is done now with the "Connected Math" series of middle school math textbooks, with each unit being a basically magazine-sized softcover and students going through multiple books a year. I've never taught out of them so I don't know how well it works in terms of books disappearing. Someone who actually taught out of them would know more, but here's my guess on how that works:

As with almost everything ever, I suspect there are both advantages and disadvantages to doing it that way. The most obvious advantages I see offhand would be that students who move without warning take a smaller (and, presumably, cheaper) book with them when they go and books taking up less room in backpacks and lockers. I suspect the disadvantages would include more overhead of checking books in and out (in my old district, this had to be done by the librarian's assistant in the bookroom, so took a chunk of classtime in which we had to walk all the way across the campus and wait in line as she dealt with the whole class one by one, plus a lot of hassle dealing with stragglers who were absent on book checkout day) and in different units having different numbers of books available, meaning that a poorly-organized school (which this one was) would have to scramble to find new books every time it turned out we had more missing than we thought we did for the next unit rather than dealing with that once for the whole year in September. (I always planned on it taking at least two or three weeks before all kids would have textbooks, because that school did not check the number of students taking a given level of math against the number of copies of that textbook and deal with making them match ahead of time, meaning that we would inevitably run out of books as we'd lose quite a few each year and there was no money or process to replace them proactively.)