I was contacted by the Guardian yesterday for my views on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plans to do away with printed textbooks and move over to textbooks online.

Here’s my response. Unfortunately, it didn’t make it into print. The reason (I assume and I hope) was that I picked up my email too late for it to be used. Journalists work on a different timescale to most bloggers, so although Anthea Lipsett from The Guardian sent me an email asking me to respond within an hour, by the time I’d seen the email the deadline was long past.

Usually, I check my email every hour or so, but I was running an Inside The Workplace event for people teaching the Diploma yesterday, so I could only check at lunchtime.

As I was racing against time, I don’t regard these musings as terribly profound. I said:

My view is that using online textbooks is fine to an extent, but  that there is a danger that what will happen is that the printing costs will be transferred from the State to families! On the other hand, young people do much of their reading online these days, and they will therefore probably be more prepared to read textbooks. Also, having online textbooks makes it much more economic to update them more frequently than is usually the case.

There are further thoughts on the matter from other people in Lipsett’s article.

What do you think?

Update: a nicely-balanced article on the subject from Steve Wheeler.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.