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Chinney
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
Location: Ottawa, ON
 
2012-01-06, 14:33

All that being said, I can certainly see an advantage from the sheer weight perspective of moving to an all e-book approach for textbooks.

Even for my kids' high school courses, the weight of their backpacks astounds me, and is unhealthy on their backs. At high school, the individual schools are supplying the texts in any event. Why don't schools just invest in some cheap e-readers and hand them out to students (on loan, maybe with a deposit) with the e-versions of the texts downloaded on to them? I would think that the costs would be less than handing out the textbooks. While some e-readers would go missing, so do some textbooks, and given that those texts are not cheap, I would imagine that the total underlying financial risk would probably be less (and essentially neglibible if a deposit is required). And for students who already have tablets, just provide a link and code for them to get the texts on an appropriate reading app.

Problem solved (at the high school level, anyway), if you can get the publishers to play along.

When there's an eel in the lake that's as long as a snake that's a moray.
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