Textbooks? The Buzz just keeps Buzzing . . .

At my other blog, there are some comments from a recent thread in response to a post called Will the Kindle Fail. You can see what I said at Print in the Communication Ecology or the original post and all 58 (as of this morning) comments at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard.

But here's the crux of the issue for Print Output Infrastructure players.

Cmt 52:

. . While it would be great to replace college textbooks with an e-reader, courses often require multiple books. Q: How do you compare passages and quotes in books when you only have one reader? 3. On college e-textbooks: Who didn’t write in their books in college? I don’t think that the kindle note-taking features are robust enough for a Uni student. 4. The size of a kindle is too small to digest content when speed-reading.

Then I said:

Since reinventing textbooks is one of my pet projects, I really like comment 52.

The trick is that Kindle 2.0, 3.0 and 4.0 with, and only with, digital print output is the secret sauce. But Amazon is already doing books on demand, so it should be pretty soon.

My recent column at Mediashift/PBS.org Print is the Next Big Thing