Could eBooks Save Millions for Education? (Part 1)

In a previous article, I mentioned that I was doing an interim study to look at potential cost savings by jumping out of the 20th century and into the 21st century and taking a serious look at electronic books as a potential replacement for old-fashioned hardback, traditional textbooks. A few months ago, I was introduced to a pretty neat little gadget called a “Kindle” produced by Amazon. A Kindle is a very small, electronic book that has the capacity to store the same information that could be found in 3,500 hardback books. Having spent 13 years in a high school classroom, I know full well what a box of books weigh because I have unloaded many of them. I also know that the cost for that very basic teaching tool continues to escalate. After seeing a Kindle and holding it in my hands and flipping through the pages, I thought “wow, this little electronic tool could revolutionize the way we teach children and could dramatically reduce costs”.

Now, let’s take a look at some possible numbers. Again, this is an interim study and these are just estimates. You take 654,540 common education students statewide (K-12), many of those students have six subjects per day and six books per child. I do not have to extrapolate that figure to see how many textbooks that is. It’s a bunch! Without getting specific, you can just do some common cowboy math and figure out that it is a lot of truck loads of books. I don’t know what it costs to haul a truck load of books but it is not cheap. If you figure a Kindle probably weighs a couple of pounds or less and then you take six copies of almost any book you choose and compare that, I think it would be easy to see that freight alone gets pretty pricey. Also consider the fact that people make lots of money writing the content for textbooks. That probably would not change. It still takes learned individuals to write these. The difference is the cost savings of hauling untold truckloads of hard books versus little compact devices that can hold 3,500 books. There has got to be a savings there just in freight.

Before you think that I own stock in the Kindle Company, I am not stuck on the Kindle as the only option. Although one can be had by an individual for less than 150 dollars, I am sure that there could be a tremendous savings if bought in bulk by a large school system. There may be other brands out there that can do the same thing. If you step up your expenditure, you can go to the Apple iPad which shows illustrations and graphs. To my knowledge, the Kindle is just black and white. One of the questions I have had posed is “what do you do about color?” There might be a device that will do that and Kindle may even have the technology now, I’m not sure. If they don’t, there are some other products from other companies like Barnes and Noble that has a device called the “Nook” and Sony also has the “Reader” that might fit the bill. With the cost of education ever-increasing, we have to figure out if there is a way to carry out the mission of educating our kids with less dollars. It is called efficiency and businesses have to find better ways to be efficient all the time, or they don’t survive. I think it’s only fair that education look at some of these potential efficiencies and see if there is a way to get the job done on less.