Last month, Apple announced iBooks 2 for iPad, a free app featuring iBooks textbooks, an evolution of previous e-book forays that will offer fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, navigation and other features. Apple also announced the all-new iTunes U app for their iPad, iPhone and iPod that allows teaching and taking entire courses. Leading education services companies, including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson, will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore, with most priced at $14.99 or less. And a new iBooks Author - a free authoring tool available today for the Mac - allows anyone to create iBooks textbooks.

On the surface, this should be a welcome technology, with textbook costs a long-standing burden on parents and students - not to mention the load of lugging around a backpack filled with heavy texts. According to the U.S. Dept. of Education, textbook costs remain a major barrier to higher education for many students, with prices rising more than four times the rate of inflation. Both the Bush and Obama administrations have endorsed the development and use of electronic textbooks, issuing reports on how to make textbooks more affordable, and specifically recommending no-cost online textbooks, electronic readers and online collections of educational content. Last week, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski joined Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to discuss the state of digital learning in American schools. At the first-ever Digital Learning Day Town Hall in Washington, D.C., the Digital Textbook Collaborative presented the "Digital Textbook Playbook," a plan to help K-12 schools transition to digital textbooks.

The plan points out a strong motivation, together with numerous challenges. While the U.S. spends more than $7 billion a year on textbooks, too many students are using books that are 7-10 years old with outdated material. And, the U.S. trails countries like South Korea in transitioning to digital textbooks; the country has announced that they will begin transitioning all students to digital textbooks starting in 2013. On the other hand, about a third of Americans - 100M people - have not yet adopted broadband at home.

As a result, Genachowski challenged state leaders and the digital textbook industry ecosystem to make national adoption of digital textbook a reality. He then announced a meeting for March 2012 with CEOs of companies in the digital learning space to drive national adoption of digital textbooks in the next five years. He even mentioned Apple in his prepared remarks.

So, we’ve got both industry and government moving to make e-textbooks a reality. What’s not to like? Well, say the skeptics, government and industry often have their own political and profit-based agendas, and fact and figures are often manipulated to illuminate the desired result. Does technology itself improve learning conditions? In 2009, the Department of Education released a study of whether math and reading software helped student achievement in first, fourth, and sixth grades, based on testing in hundreds of classrooms. The study found that the difference in test scores between the software-using classes and the control group was "not statistically different from zero."

OK, so an app or e-device alone might not guarantee educational improvement, but what about the cost and convenience factors? Again, the devil is in the details. As for Apple’s solution, the terms and conditions attached to purchasing e-textbooks are said by some pundits to be "onerous" at best, or even "greedy and evil." Let’s just say that the interests of big business don’t always match the interests of the consumer.

What is needed is to ensure that we don’t replace one problem with another. One would hope that the market should be able to weed out a costly solution in favor of one fitting better in a limited budget - but think about all those expensive smart-boards that lie fallow in many classrooms. At the same time, there is enough noise today about reducing government overhead that there will be mixed reviews on any government mandated solution that cozies up to big business. Open source, anyone?-agc