``From the beginning of the next school year in August, maths and science students in California's high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review...''
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This is completely bullshit and it's probably a fraud. The only people capable of putting up textbooks are publishers of course, and they are going to be charging plenty for that service. And in the meantime, there was no need, because there is probably nothing wrong with last year's books. Unless things have changed a lot, we rarely got new books. I almost always got somebody's book from the year before or the year before that. If we lost the book, we had to pay for it.
I am almost certain that it would save more money to just order replacements on an as needed basis. There has been quite a long going scam where publishers keep `updating' the textbooks, when there little or no informational or education need.
Somebody who knows this stuff better, needs to fill in the gaps...
And another thing, `learning' off web pages mostly sucks. When ever I've tried to follow some topic on the web, I quickly reach a ceiling where there is little beyond a newspaper or popular magazine level. Above that are the on-line journals all of which require paid subscriptions. While there are many out of copyright books available, they are all carefully selected to be useless for studying anything difficult or in depth.
UCB is supposed to an open system for lecture notes and other information, but the few places I searched are slso carefully constructed as useless for study purposes. You have to be logged in to get much. I am sure most professors don't write well constructed text. It's too much work, when you can just lecture.
Anyway, my frustrations with learning on the web, have lead me to buy more books rather than fewer. Also the way I have to learn things is pretty much the same as it was as a kid. I have to read, make notes, draw, write down symbols, do some exercises and play with say, math ideas, before I get them. I can't just stare at screen and get anywhere. There is something about that old fashioned process that works for me.
Watching my kid learn was interesting because he basically just read the books, did the homework and got great grades. But there seemed to me to be something a little superficial about it. It worried me a little that it would go in ear and out the other just as fast. He eventually gravitated to more `hands-on' type science which seemed like a much better way to learn.
Oh, and how about kids who don't have a high speed connection, with a fast processor and graphics systems? I assume most of these web books are heavy on the graphics and use formats like PDF which are a tremendous waste of time to download even by chapter. Most science books have large numbers of photos, diagrams, tables, and illustrations which eat up huge quantities of storage.
This is all very bad and probably won't work. What nonsense.
CG