ABILENE REPORTER-NEWS

Tim Gau went to a textbook vendor fair recently to order next year’s batch of books for Ballinger Independent School District, which is one of his duties as district technology director.

Ballinger ISD students get laptops starting in fifth grade. Gau was hoping that, with new legislation this year allowing him to buy electronic textbooks, he could save some money.

“All the publishers told us a textbook on a CD would cost the same thing as a hard copy,” Gau said. “I was kind of surprised. But every regular book comes with an electronic copy that’s only good for one computer. The way I see it, our best option is to buy a textbook for every one of our students, put them in a closet someplace and put the software on the computers. We won’t save anything.”

Gau’s disappointment has spread throughout the Big Country, where at least 10 districts have armed their students with laptops and are ready to venture into the paperless era.

While other states have dipped a toe into computer-based textbooks, Texas made a splash last year by passing legislation allowing schools to use state textbook money for digital instructional materials.

But as the state implementation and approval process for digital materials evolves this spring, publishers are saying the expected savings may never be realized on electronic textbooks.

“That is total crock,” said Brownwood ISD Superintendent Reece Blincoe, one of two superintendents invited to share their thoughts on the matter with the Senate Education Committee in Austin recently. “Publishers have had electronic texts long before this bill. Those textbooks are put together digitally before they are ever put on paper. Shame on them for sitting on that profit while we could be using this for education.”

Eve Myers, southwest region vice president for Holt McDougal books, said publishers can’t offer any savings this year because they bid out their book prices before the legislation passed. However, she said companies are still throwing in free digital versions with each textbook, as they have for years.

“For the next (round of textbooks), I think publishers will take advantage of some of these new rules to offer their items at different costs,” she said, but she’s still not sure that means big savings. “There’s a perception that because a book is online it will be cheaper, but that’s not necessarily the case. Sure, you don’t have the costs for printing and binding and paper, but that is offset to some degree by the fact that you still have to have network infrastructure, servers, technology support, ongoing development to keep up with updates on Windows, Flash, Adobe. ... We’ll have to update our books continuously.”

Jay Diskey with the Association of American Publishers reports about 15 percent of the cost of a public school textbook is dedicated to printing, production and binding.

However, Diskey added: “If there’s the assumption that we’re going digital and publishers should lower their content prices, I don’t think that’s anything that’s going to happen any time soon and maybe not at all. The question is whether you want quality curriculum.”

Blincoe’s district has spent $1.2 million in local money and grants to give students laptops that will become obsolete in four to five years.

New state rules allow districts to keep 50 percent of the money they save by going digital and spend it on approved devices like laptops. The state will keep the other half.

He asked senators to encourage publishers to offer fair prices on digital materials. And when they do, he asked the state to give districts a bigger cut of the savings.

Most larger districts, like Abilene, don’t have enough funds to equip all their students with laptops or digital reading devices, which means they’ll probably stick with traditional books until more technology funding is available to schools or hardware becomes significantly less expensive.

At the Senate hearing Blincoe attended, Texas Education Agency officials estimated 400 districts are ready to implement digital materials, but Blincoe believes that’s a stretch.

“That’s where schools could save money — by using these materials instead of electronic versions of the textbooks,” said John Lopez, TEA’s managing director of instructional materials and educational technology.

Last week was the deadline for publishers and developers to pitch their computer-based teaching materials to the state commissioner of education, who is expected to compile a list of approved items in early March. Districts can use textbook money to buy these materials. However, districts must first buy a class set of printed textbooks for each teacher, a stipulation legislators added to appease publishers.

The commissioner’s list could include materials like Compass Learning, which has online digital lessons based on specific Texas curriculum standards.

Another law, HB 2488, introduces open-source options that could bypass publishing companies altogether. The state is exploring the concept this year by accepting bids for open-source English books, which are universally available online for free.

Legislation says districts can use approved open-source books that are aligned with current research in the subject, cover Texas curriculum standards and include teacher training.

California, dealing with drastic education funding cuts, has commissioned nonprofit organizations to provide the books. University professors are also willing to contribute as part of their profession, said George Saltsman, executive director of the Adams Center for Teaching and Learning at Abilene Christian University.

“We live in a publish or perish world,” Saltsman said. “Our job isn’t just to be teachers, but we also have to be doing scholarly activity to generate new knowledge.”

It’s unclear when districts will have wide access to approved open-source textbooks, but Rep. Scott Hochberg, who sponsored HB 2488, has a dream.

“The vision is that we would have a digital textbook library available for statewide use by any student in Texas public schools for free, or for a very low cost,” he said.