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Originally Posted by RWood
The last reason given for a change in the elementary school math books was that the word problems were out of touch with the current world -- "A train leaves Boston ...."
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I think someone was just looking for an excuse to make a sale. Last I checked, there were still trains running to and from Boston.
Besides, isn't it ironic that in Social Studies we try to teach kids about other cultures and times, but heaven forbid that a math problem should be something they don't see every day! When I was a kid, I think it would have been cool to try to figure out if the trajectory of the rock thrown from a catapult would allow it to clear the castle wall, even if that wasn't an everyday sight in my neighborhood.
Back on-topic, I wonder if it's really going to save that much money, given that e-book publishers charge almost as much for an e-book as for the paper version. (The last time I checked, Crichton's "State of Fear", for example, was $7.95 for paper, $7.45 for e-book.) Some day the e-book publishers will wise-up and discover that they could sell tons--or should I say gigabytes--of e-books if they would cut the price. The first one who does that will get rich.
Think about it. Paperbacks sell for about 1/3 the price of the hardcover version. If e-books sold for 1/3 the price of the paperback, you'd see a massive increase in sales, with no printing, storage or shipping costs. And if those were e-textbooks, entire school systems would be jumping on-board.