Can Old-School Print Textbooks Survive the Digital Revolution?

When students flood into classrooms this September at Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., they won't be lugging around those antiquated old objects we call "books." Instead, the 330 kids who make up the new school's student body will be using Apple iBook laptops, provided by the school, to keep up on their lessons on everything from anthropology to zoology. The school, which is going into its first academic year, has made a decision that not only has reverberations in the world of education but also in that of educational publishing: Empire is striking traditional print textbooks in favor of computers.

Calvin Baker, superintendent of the Vail School District, says the teachers have worked diligently to ensure that the school's program meets the state-mandated educational standards. With the entire campus wired for the Internet, students will be able to access information in dramatically different ways than ever before. And, according to Baker, this gives the schools' staff the freedom and the responsibility to choose from a vast array of source materials not available in the traditional model. Instead of being bound by the textbook, Empire's teachers can now call on educational software or any of the millions of websites or documents online to mold the young minds in their charge. Story continues below ?

While trade publishers haven't seen consumers respond significantly to ebooks (according to the International Digital Publishing Forum consumer demand for ebooks is waning?4,351 titles were released in the format in 2004, down 39% from the previous year), educational publishers are looking at a very different picture. Both educators and students in secondary and higher education are hungry for digital alternatives to print. Just this month a group of major higher-education textbook publishers launched a program to put digital textbooks in campus bookstores.

Despite the growing interest in e-textbooks in education, the teachers at Empire took the digital learning experience a step further by outlining a curriculum that relies almost entirely on educational software and the Internet. Jeremy Gypton, a social-studies teacher at the school, and member of the committee that established Empire's curriculum, said that the primary reason digital textbooks weren't purchased is because they weren't an improvement on traditional textbooks. After talking to sales reps from some of the major textbook publishers like Houghton Mifflin and Glencoe (a division of McGraw-Hill), Gypton says one thing became clear: Most of the major textbook publishers didn't offer anything more in digital form than they did in print. "Why get a computer and just put the same information on it?" Gypton asks.

With this in mind, Gypton and company invested Empire's budget in educational software and programs provided by, among others, a company called ABC-CLIO. A publisher of reference websites and databases, with a focus on history and social studies, ABC-CLIO is a subscriber-based service that allows users access to topic-specific websites. These websites, according to Gypton, "eclipse a textbook" in both breadth and depth.

Not all of Empire's teachers were able to find resources like ABC-CLIO, however. The school's biology teacher, Michael Frank, for example, had to look for source materials elsewhere. Drawing on everything from traditional books and scientific journals to CDs and DVDs, Frank still finds this hodge-podge approach a preferable alternative to relying solely on a traditional textbook. "Our curriculum, then, can be driven by the state and national science education standards rather than the chapters in whatever textbook happens to be adopted by the district."

Frank also points out that e-textbooks didn't offer a very attractive price point?which begs the overriding question of money itself, and just how big an investment Empire is making in its laptop program. Baker says that while the laptops (which the students use during the school year as they would a textbook, taking them home at night and using them in the classroom) were costly?about $850 each?the school was able to afford them by foregoing traditional print textbooks. "The laptops were funded in large part by using the money that would normally be used to outfit a new school with a complete set of textbooks," Baker says.

Empire's significant investment in ABC-CLIO, an educational software provider, as opposed to a textbook publisher, points to just how significantly the educational-publishing market could change. If more schools start looking for digital alternatives to the traditional textbook, smaller educational-software companies may start taking a significant chunk of the business controlled by the major textbook publishers.

Of course, this scenario is still a long way off, as most high schools don't have the money or resources to start handing out laptops as if they're No. 2 pencils. Mark Schneiderman says that, according to data from two years ago, about 600 school districts in the country had one-to-one laptop programs. But among these programs, most were pilots in which only students in particular schools or grades, rather than all students in the district, were provided their own laptop. Furthermore, as a new school, Empire has money at its disposal that other schools might not. "One of the things we need to keep in mind is that this is a new school starting from scratch," Schneiderman says, "so they didn't have textbooks they'd already bought; a lot of districts going to this model are phasing it in."

Daniel Domenech, senior vice president of McGraw-Hill Education, applauds what's happening at Empire but concurs with Schneiderman that the digital revolution has far from arrived in most schools. "What they're doing is commendable and interesting and it's clear to us that there is a movement towards digitized material. Having said that, it's not an overwhelming movement," he says. "The majority of school districts around the country are still requesting hard-copy textbooks."