AA>   You are probably right.  However, I would be curious as to what 
textbook
 AA> publishers are doing about the threat of competition from the Internet.
 AA> Textbooks are terribly expensive, and school budgets, 
 AA> in my experience, seldom
 
competition?  Where are there any text book writers offereing to write and 
publish on the Net? 
 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 
There is excellent material, however can it presented and used as a 
replacement for a text?
 AA> every course objective and
 AA> so negate the need to purchase expensive texts.  Are publishers taking 
any
 AA> steps that anyone knows of to compete in this area?
 AA> --Art--
Publishers are taking steps to keep Internet browsers from accessing their 
materials until someway is found to pay the royalties. writers usually have 
placed the publishers under obligation to pay them for their writing  nomater 
how the book is distributed.
One of the difficulties is the use of caches by internet services to hold 
materials frequently read by their users. This means that the web site that 
holds the "text" records only one  hit, read, by the service. In fact there 
may be hundreds of users reading the "text" once it is located in the cache 
while the original provider shows only one reader. If a classroom of fifty 
kids reads a "text" the writer is entitled to compensation based on the fifty 
hard copy books that would have been sold. More and more internet access is 
being shut off to the public until this royalty issue is resolved. Until 
publishers find away to get paid so they can pay their authors don't look for 
a major text publisher to offer texts on the NET. 
--- Maximus 2.01wb
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