daemonburrito's Journal: NPR Lets Me Down

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=99961163

Awful idea, surely implemented with crapware, hatched from a Faustian bargain with academic textbook publishers.

The story says that the price of an electronic textbook should be "about half" the price of paper textbooks. The discount should be *much* deeper than 50%, as colleges are allowing the publishers to destroy the second-hand market and take away the ability of students to hand down or retain their books. Criminal.

Hint to supporters of this scheme: The promise of technology in education is greater access for more people to information and insights, and new ways to organize information with metadata. In other words, people *sharing* in ways never before possible. You're proposing the opposite.

The story contains a contradiction that illustrates how this faculty and the new electronic distributors misunderstand the nature of the web. In the first section, "Changing With Students":

The new generation of textbooks is trying to be in tune with the way students learn in the age of Wikipedia and YouTube.

However, never in the rest of the story is an implicit assumption questioned; that is, the property that makes Wikipedia and YouTube special is that you interact with them by clicking around with an lcd panel. YouTube and Wikipedia have something much more powerful in common: Almost limitless information contributed by and accessible to anybody, efficiently organized with tons of meta.

The executive vice-president of CourseSmart and evangelist for the publishers' model of "e-book" distribution, Frank Lyman, was interviewed for the story (why?). On their humorous misunderstanding of what a blog is, I found a link to a nytimes article that isn't favorable to their plans.

Such awful reporting, with apparently no research, so soon after I was singing their praises. File this one under "breathless reading of press releases."