Digital textbooks have gotten a lot of ink in recent months. In January, Apple attracted attention when it announced its foray into the field with the iBook, a multimedia-rich textbook for the iPad produced by the biggest educational publishers and costing less than $15. The next month, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, unveiled the Obama administration’s Digital Learning Playbook and called for all students to use digital textbooks by 2017.

For all the noise nationally, movement to digital has been slow at the state and district level. Digital textbooks still account for only a small fraction of overall textbook sales. Still, several states have enacted changes in recent years to make it easier for districts to go digital and use free material in the
classroom that’s available digitally.

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