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Sunday, April 15, 2012

Etextbooks Attracting Involvement of the FCC, Education Department, and Higher Ed

To kick off Digital Learning Day on Feb. 1, 2012, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Department of Education jointly held a Town Hall in Washington, which issued an election year "challenge to states and companies to ensure every K-12 student has a digital textbook within five years."

Quite an ambitious goal! However, ebook technology is evolving and stabilizing today and the pricing of textbooks (from K-12 through college) has become a major issue.

I was asked to write about this for a blog posting for Information Today. You may want to give it a read.

Many issues remain unsettled today, but the efforts to experiment and test ideas and technologies are a positive indicator of interest and innovation. Student acceptance of etextbooks is still a question, with some scattered surveys finding that students still prefer the current print-based systems.

Ebooks accounted for only 2.8% of the estimated $8 million textbook market in the U.S. in 2010, so the products are still at a very early stage of development - but clearly, there are efforts to accelerate this quickly in the coming years.

6 comments:

  1. My opinion is that e-books will be more attractive for students to read. They will be much cheaper and a lot of paper will be saved. This is still an innovation but in the following decades this will be the major tool for studying.

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  2. Thanks for the opportunity to comment.

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  4. The concept of open source began recently and still it's being developed by the professional developers to help the designers overcome the barriers. Though there are some excellent non-graphic programs are released for several other purposes like web browsing,animation software industry has a step ahead to develop more and more open source programs. Though the pros in the graphic designing industry have money to expend on software beginners do not have hundreds and thousands dollars to afford for the software.

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