Open Thought Stream on Paperless Books

I think there is a major opportunity in the educational industry in shifting textbooks to a paperless format. We have already seen thousands of consumers adapt the kindle platform and even smaller applications of the same technology such as Kindle for the iPhone. There is no doubt that paperless books are an efficient and long term cost saving way of exposing oneself to the same content found in traditional books.

There a few reasons why I think that paperless books would be successful in education:

1. Students rarely highlight and annotate books the way the used to because they desire to sell the books back at the end of the summer to redeem some of the money they spent on the books. Keep in mind, this payback is often less than 10% of the original purchase price.
   
2. Plain and simple, text books are expensive, averaging the mid 100's and often times more than 300 dollars.
   
3. Electronic Text Books or Text Book for that matter, would require a single purchase or at most one initial purchase followed by a series of very small purchases in order to download and update content each semester.
   

I imagine this application as a "Kindle-Like" platform, perhaps slightly larger because most student will carry it in a backpack. The interface should allow for viewing, reading, and interacting with the text. I would also imagine that students would benefit from the technology incorporating some kind of word processing applications and/or allow for a way for users to highlight pertinent information; perhaps in the same way Evernote allows PC and Mac users to catalog and store information they deem important when interacting with the web, word documents, and other electronic files (not to mention the mobile device capabilities, but that is a whole post in intself)

Anyways, I don't plan on pursuing the design of such an application for now but I really believe there is a huge amount of opportunity. Imagine the introduction of a cheap version of the technology in developing countries. The ability to make one purcahse, or recieve one donation*** which would allow for constant and continous content update could create educational opporutinies for 1000's of underprivledged students without the need for continued aid (the very subject of my next post)