In a message of , Arthur Abel (1:2613/380) writes:
 AA>  You are probably right.  However, I would be curious as to what 
 AA>textbook
 AA>publishers are doing about the threat of competition from the Internet.
 AA>Textbooks are terribly expensive, and school budgets, in my experience, 
 AA>seldom
 AA>allow for the purchase of the numbers and kinds of texts that teachers 
 AA>would
 AA>like to use.  I assume that most school districts have curriculum 
 AA>outlines of
 AA>what should be covered in every course (in some cases, these are 
 AA>provided even
 AA>by the state), and it may only be a matter of time before districts or
 AA>teachers can find excellent material on just about every course 
 AA>objective and
 AA>so negate the need to purchase expensive texts.  Are publishers taking 
 AA>any
 AA>steps that anyone knows of to compete in this area?
I seriously doubt you will find free replacements for standard texts on the   
internet.  It costs a lot of money to develop course materials, and fancy   
multimedia etc does not come free either.  Somebody has to pay for all this   
investment.
I may be biased -- I wrote a college text book.  I spent a good part of my   
life for five years on the project.  Do you think I would have done that with 
  no compensation?  And do you think a publisher would have put that into a 
form   suitable for dissemination by any medium without the likelihood of a 
profit.
It's not obvious until you try to do it, but writing a quality text or its   
online equivalent is a huge task.  The transformation of a teacher's class   
notes or handouts into a textbook is much more complex than you might  think.
I don't know much about what publishers are doing about electronic  
replacements for books.  They seem to be very tentative to this point, and  
unsure of what to charge for the products they do have.  I have tried to  
price online encyclopedias for our UMassK12 internet service for teachers and 
 students.  They are either incapable of generating a price or else come up  
with something totally unaffordable.  One wanted us to pay $20,000 for our  
2,000 users.  Needless to say, we could not do that.
 
--- msged 1.97S ZTC
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