The textbook has been a vital tool of the academic world for a very long time. Ever since paper became cheap around the renaissance period, books have been printed up en masse for students, as well as for everybody else. But in this day and age, the textbook is facing a threat that even the greatest scholars of old could never have predicted: the ereader. Electronic reading devices are essentially small screens with only a bare minimum of buttons on them, and can be used to display pretty much any kind of written material you can think of. And a growing number of people are of the opinion that ereaders are going to replace textbooks entirely in our age of environmental consciousness, crushing loads of books and a desire for ease and more technology.
The technology has been here for years. What has finally come about which is different is that ereaders are finally inexpensive, portable and easily accessible. From just about any place where you can get cellphone service, you can use an ereader to read anything from your favorite magazines to the morning paper, or from the latest popular novels all the way back to the greatest classics of literature. You can also read your text books this way.
While a lot of people are of the opinion that the ereader is going to inevitably replace the textbook in our modern age, there is never going to be a time when that happens entirely. While many of the more progressive schools are going to allow discounted rates for the books they sell to be sold digitally to their students’ ereaders, there is far too much at stake for this to become the general rule everywhere. Keep in mind that book sales are a massive revenue stream for every university that uses books at all. Why would they want to be rid of them?