E-Textbooks should be free textbooks by Yglesias

But the potential for a true game-changer is out there in the form of Apple’s new iBooks Author software. The software is available for free to Mac owners and should make it relatively easy to put snazzy new digital textbooks together. This opens up the possibility that textbooks could be made the way they probably should have been made all along—by philanthropic institutions or government agencies rather than profit-seeking corporations. Freed from the need to physically manufacture, store, transport, and distribute books, it could become feasible for a university, a foundation, or even a large school district to simply hire someone to write the book.

Will anyone do it? Your guess is as good as mine. But they should. As it stands, K-12 education philanthropy in the United States is a game with hundreds of millions of dollars in play each year, even before you consider the universities. Freeing school districts from the costs of book acquisition by paying for the creation of high-quality free alternatives would be an excellent investment. Of course any philanthropist would hesitate to produce an Apple-exclusive product, but surely the Gates Foundation could be tempted to team up with its benefactor’s old rival Apple to break the textbook cabal. The good news is that the much-criticized user agreement associated with iBooks Author explicitly exempts books distributed for free from any restriction. In the short-term, of course, savings from free textbooks would be clawed back by the price of tablets. But schools are already spending bundles on computers, often with little to show for it. More to the point, the price of electronic gadgets falls steadily each year while textbooks keep getting more expensive. Apple’s technology plus a relatively modest investment from credible outsiders could not so much transform the $8 billion K-12 textbook market as destroy it altogether.