[Kevin]

Here's a link to a new color e-reader being offered for just over $1,000 in Asia. Despite it being obviously better than books and prospectively allowing public school students to be able to manipulate the way their pages look (i.e., highlighting and taking notes on the page), allowing content providers the ability to update things in real time, etc., I still see some major issues.

First, there's the middle man. Your bookstore and the hundreds of book wholesalers would be cut out. Bad news for them, good news for the publisher. Trouble is, this transition would be something gradual, so the wholesalers aren't going away overnight. They'll die a long, painful, loud death where they'll be doing everything they can to keep the print medium alive and/or put themselves into a position to try and wholesale e-content.

Publishers will suffer because with the ability to do live updates, they're going to have a tough time year to year in justifying new versions as all they'd normally have to do would be to send through a patch.

DRM will also be a huge issue. Invariably, someone's going to break the code and figure out a way to pirate this stuff. Further, schools won't transition to this technology unless they can realize some cost savings. Most primary/secondary school districts use their textbooks for several years, passing them from kid to kid. The DRM technology will have to figure out a way to distinguish between that practice and piracy. It'll have to figure out some headache-free way of passing the e-content from kid to kid without cost and without hassle, but still manage to protect the publisher's IP. That'll be a tough balance to strike. Further, I know some more wealthy school districts actually sell their old texts to poorer school districts. No one wants to see that mutually beneficial practice stop, so these rights will probably need to be transferrable to third parties outside of the school district. Again, a method needs to be devised to make that practice manageable.

For higher ed, I think these things are absolutely ideal for everyone but the wholesalers. Publishers get to sell new text to every single student which means (I'm assuming here), they could charge less money per text and achieve similar or better profits because the used market could (via DRM) be completely done away with. I would have loved to have one of these things in law school. Despite what some say about their old case books, I have been known to go back and look at mine. Color and manipulability is key.

For the legal profession, I think it'll be a cold day in Hell before Thomson-West makes their content available to e-readers. I don't think I've ever before encountered a company so desperate to preserve their DRM... but how cool would it be to be able to buy a set of the US Code Annotated [or some sort of expensive and extensive text you often need to refer to in your practice] (with all of your own highlights and annotations) to carry around with you in your briefcase?