Digital Textbooks

Abstract

The traditional publishing industry is seeing the first signs of its own doom while desperately hanging on to the last few dollars of profit from selling pulped forest trees. The demise of paper-based publishing is as certain and as inevitable as the end of the use of stone hieroglyphics. It's likely that Generation X will be the last to support the traditional print-publishing industry. The rationale for this prediction is simple: there is absolutely no reason for high school students to carry around pounds of books in their backpack when almost everything else is now paperless. In the following paragraphs, I will explain why the extinction of paper-based textbook publishing is inevitable and why the strategies of the publishing industry to maintain its grip should be viewed as last-gasp efforts.