The recent Amazon / Brazilian Department of Education announcement raises some larger questions about the future of (digital) textbooks.  It’s not enough to accept that textbooks will be read over devices like the iPad rather than in hardcopy.  Instead, the paradigm of digital has the potential to change the entire business model of the textbook market altogether.

But first, a preamble.

I remember reading a prominent author recently discuss the crisis of self he felt knowing that his ebook was to be a fundamentally different product of labor than his regular print books.  There is no “final draft” of an ebook; he can go back and change the digital text infinitely many times.  He will never be held accountable for any piece of writing in the same way that he would have been with hardcopy.  With that realization came flux.  What does it mean to put one’s thoughts down anymore?  Imagine the mandates of authors like Nabokov and Kafka who wanted all their unfinished fiction burnt upon their death.  In the care of opportunistic or merely generous relatives, those directives were ignored and the works shared with the world, giving us invaluable literary benchmarks like The Castle and The Original of Laura.

Textbook authors are similarly less beholden to history with the new digital textbook world.  It may not mean similarly existential crises of self-understanding as fiction authors face (as comical as that would be), but it does lead to a large disconnect around the current textbook model.

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