The Vanishing Textbook

The current economic crisis is forcing schools to look for creative ways to cut budgets. One of these ways may involve moving away from the traditional textbook toward the more functional digital textbook.

There is an unwelcome visitor in a lot of classrooms this fall. That would be the U.S. economy. States are cutting education spending to fill their budget holes. And in turn schools are cutting programs, bumping up class sizes, doing pretty much anything they can to cut costs.

One option that has started to get some attention is digital textbooks. They can go beyond just what is printed on the page. And they are a whole lot cheaper than those traditional hard-bound door stops that students have been carrying around for decades now. Marketplace's Stacey Vanek-Smith reports.

Online textbooks usually cost about $20 per student. Compare that to $100-plus for a traditional textbook. Right now digital books are only about 2 percent of the textbook market. But they're catching on fast at universities and now states are pushing them as a way for public schools to cut costs.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER: Starting this fall with high school math and science, we will be the first state in the nation to provide schools with a state-approved list of digital textbooks.

You can read the full article here.