Moore, J. (2010) State law requires digital college textbooks by 2020 VCStar.com, January 11

The article states:

Companies that sell textbooks to California universities must offer electronic versions by 2020, under a new state law.

Note that the article mixes up electronic publishing with e-books. The article assumes that a specialized reader of some kind, such as the Kindle, will be necessary, but without having detailed information on the state law, I suspect that this is not correct. By 2020, most electronic publishing is likely to be open standard, in the sense that it can be downloaded on a variety of devices, including mobile phones and/or laptops or whatever devices (brainplants?) are available by 2020.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Hi, Tony,

    As you say, a lot will happen in the next 10 years! But apart from on-line publishing and e-books, perhaps there will be a third approach – that of an International Digital Resource Bank?

    See: http://www.nen.gov.uk/news/25/the-national-digital-resource-bank.html

    Here in the UK we have a very exciting venture called the National Digital Resource Bank where local authorities sign up to the sharing of digital resources for use and re-purposing under Creative Commons. No more of this protectionist IP malarkie. I put something into the pool FOC on the hope/trust that I will find something developed by others that I can use. This has to be the way forward if we are ever to be able to add topicality and local/personal interest into resources appropriate to our own classes’ needs.

  2. I love the idea of a creative commons accessible repository, but it needs to go beyond text-based communication. I coordinate a community-based water quality monitoring project and we are building a web-based publicly accessible database at huge cost and with seemingly insurmountable technological barriers. We would love to contribute our data to an elegant commons database!

Leave a Reply to Jim Duncan Cancel reply

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here