“Kids
won’t even know what that word means,” Jeff Livingston, a McGraw-Hill Education
vice president, is quoted as saying in an interview in U.S. News and World Report.
What
word is he talking about? Typewriter? Mimeo? Icebox?
It’s
textbooks. The students of the near future, according to Livingston, won’t
recognize the word because all course materials will be online and provide an
interactive experience. Heavy, print, linear tomes will be a thing of the past.
The
U.S. News article mainly discusses
what kind of computing devices students will need and how much parents should
expect to budget for technology expenses, but Livingston’s comments about
textbooks offer a glimpse of the direction where educational publishers are
heading.
Students
currently buy textbooks, regardless of format, from a store or e-commerce site,
but Livingston says soon students will purchase all their online course
materials through a fee folded into tuition or as a subscription. He estimates
those fees/subscriptions will run about $300 to $400 per semester.
If
parents were hoping to see some savings with all-digital materials, they may be
disappointed. According to OnCampus Research’s 2013 Student Watch report,
Retail Insight: Student Shopping Trends, the average student already pays
approximately $662 per school year for course materials, mostly print—about the
same as the annual estimate for digital. That figure doesn’t factor in any
monies students might get for reselling their paper books later.