Just read an article on WSJ about custom textbooks in colleges (here's the link, not sure if this will still be free by the time you click it). The basic idea is that there are several colleges (or departments within them) that are requiring custom printed textbooks. Interestingly, though the article didn't mention this, I'm sure that some of these custom textbooks are able to be made because of the computer/web technologies (getting the material to the publisher quick enough, editing large sections of the text in soft copy, etc. Note: The specific example they gave, University of Alabama's A Writer's Reference would not need heavy editing, but I think my general thought holds true.) This irks me as we are also hitting the technological point where we could easily reduce the cost of texts for students. The article's premise is that the prime mover for the custom textbooks is the publishers wanting to dent the used-book market and the university's desire to make a royalty on the books.

One use for the money that the royalty generates is for scholarship funds. Hmmm, make the students pay more for their books so you can give money back to students. Is this supposed to be a "intro to government spending" tactic preparing the students for life after college?

 A technology that I would love to see being used sometime soon in schools is textbooks on a Kindle (or similar device). I hate reading anything long on screen, it's hard on the eyes and the mechanisms of how we read are not supported by the comparatively low resolution (a poor laser printer does about 300 dots per inch while a really good monitor does about 120 (and it's a n^2 type of thing)...this means that reading enhancers like serifs are generally bad ideas on screen), but the electronic paper or eInk in the Kindle provides a high enough effective resolution that reading it is very similar to the experience of reading a book. The eInk screen is reflective instead of emittive (you can read it in bright sunlight, you can't read it in a dark closet) which I personally think also reduces eyestrain. The cost of publishing a textbook to the Kindle or similar device is pennies (cost of writing still needs to be recovered). If we (the world) really wants to make things better for students, this would probably be a good place to start looking. All that said, I think the Kindle (or Sony's eReader) still have a ways to go before we could do all textbooks on them. The interface is decent for serial reading, but not so great for flipping back and forth between pages...and in college I often had multiple books and articles spread out at once...an idea that works on the computer screen, but not so well with eInk.

 The Kindle (I've had mine for about three weeks now) has also made me want more eInk devices. It has a very slow refresh (I haven't timed it, but it feels like about 1.5 seconds), but the effective resolution makes it awesome for reading long articles. My current wish would be to have an auxiliary screen that was eInk that I could display documents, long emails, or reference material on...anything that I need to read, especially in depth, rather than edit. Until the technology gets a lot faster, editing is still better on the LCD.