Back in Bama

Back in my home state of Bama, there is a discussion going on in the capital for 2012....over school books.  There's this idea of moving over to each kid in Bama having an electronic tablet of sorts, and all school text books being issued digitally to each kid.  The state is estimating this shift to cost in the range of $800 million....which is a heck of a lot of money.

The experts say that the current pricing of text books is about $90 each....which makes it pretty difficult to buy new books on a regular schedule.

The problems with a e-book situation?  Well.....you can figure that it'd cost $200 for each kid to get his e-book and at least ten percent would damage their e-book each and every year.  Most parents would have issues over this replacement situation and some probably would not be able to readily pay for such a replacement.

In the 1970s when I attended school....we still had some books dating back to the late-1950s (our English Literature book for example).  I can remember one science-related class where the teacher had to correct the material written into the text book because over a period of eight years....the text book had outdated information in it.

This e-book episode sounds kind of interesting but I just can't see kids being able to make this work.  There's always the batter-charge episode.....where the kid might show up for a class and his e-book is 'dead'.....so he just smiles at the teacher because he can't recite some Shakespeare line from his e-book.  Or you might have some young gal who figures out how to add more books to the e-book, and is sitting in a math class and reading some French novel.

My guess is that the political folks will talk on the subject and eventually just give up.  Real books will stay on for a while in Bama (maybe for forty more years).  Heck, my old 1958 English Literature book might still be in use for all I know.