e-Textbooks: Big news, but the big ideas aren't here (yet).

Electronic textbooks are accepted as an important step in the educational advances offered by new media. But what are they, and what could they become?

During our family vacation in San Diego I spied a Saturday front page headline. The San Diego Union-Tribune declared "Digital textbooks new word in schools". Maybe it was a slow newsday, but there it was displayed prominently in the vending machine window. So I went online and checked the story out.

The story described how the local colleges have dramatically increased their use of electronic textbooks. This is certainly good news-- it reduces student costs, simplifies certain sales logistics, and it likely has net environmental benefits.

However, it's still just a "textbook"-- the mostly text content is presented sequentially in "pages". Probably students, the consumers, are also critical of the features touted by an interviewed McGraw-Hill representative. These e-textbooks are active on a per-semester lease and can't be traded on the used book market.

It's hard to get excited about a product that mimics an existing product while simultaneously making it less tangible and reducing ownership rights.

I'm sitting here right now in the zoo parking lot as my children nap and their grandmother finds souveneirs. I wish I could use this "smartphone" to access educational content that was truly electronic. Say, animal descriptions indexed to my phone's GPS. Or an index of video on the animal. Well, there's no such thing available from the traditional publishers. But the San Diego Zoo website mixed with offerings from YouTube is one DIY start.