Good news for Print. Bad news for textbook publishers. How will they compete with Free?

I got this in an email yesterday, The big type and the bigger type is just me.

The last defense of textbook publishers was being aligned with standards. Now that's gone in California. If California were a stand alone economy it would be in the top twenty in the world.

August 13 , 2009

Dear Friends,

We have some exciting news about our "next-generation textbooks!” CK-12 Foundation is thrilled to share with you the results of “The Free Digital Textbook Initiative” Phase One Report that was released by California State Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger on August 10, 2009.

During the first phase of The Digital Textbook Initiative, 9 different institutions and individuals submitted a total of 16 high school math and science digital textbooks for state education officials to review. Out of the 16 digital textbooks, 10 of those digital textbooks met at least 90 percent of the California State Board of Education’s adoption standards and 6 of those 10 were CK-12 FlexBooks.

In addition, of the 16 digital textbooks, only 4 met 100 percent of the standards and 3 of them were from the CK-12 Foundation: CK-12 Single Variable Calculus, CK-12 Trigonometry and CK-12 Chemistry. The reviewed digital textbooks are available for high schools to use this fall from http://about.ck12.org/ca/freetextbooks

This is an important milestone and we truly appreciate your support in our effort to develop a more efficient, interactive and cost-effective learning environment for the young generation.

California State officials will review other academic subject digital textbooks in the next few months. We believe with the support and encouragement from our expert advisors, developers and contributors, CK-12 will continue to provide standards-aligned digital textbooks for free to every student in California and eventually to students around the world!

The full text of the report is available on the California Learning Resource Network’s Website: http://www.clrn.org/fdti/FDTI_Report.pdf. We have also included the below review summary for your reference.

The Good News for Print was posted last Sunday.
It's about books on demand. The really good news for the kids and teachers is still to come. Clickable Print will take the cost of Professional Development to zero while increasing the transparency and accountability and thus bring it's effectiveness much closer to 100%.

Here's one of the 188 videos that returned from a Google Video search for Professional Development for chemistry teachers: