E-enabled textbooks (as this article designates e-books) look really good when you compare them to the dead tree version. They don't waste natural resources, they can be kept up to date, and they can support searching and other functions. But the real debate - completely ignored in this article - is whether e-books are the best way to present digital text, as compared to, say, web pages. Sure, e-books offer digital rights management, which publishers want. But they do this at the cost of requiring special viewers and making their content useless for anything other than reading. And despite the propaganda in the headline, e-books, as thus far implemented, have not really lowered costs to the end user.
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