Waltham Words: Not so fast on E-textbooks

This love of odd facts, encyclopedias, and technology has fueled my outrage over an absurd piece of propagandistic trash on the rise of electronic textbooks which appeared in the New York Times earlier this week. Ostensibly intended to describe the increased use of e-textbooks and online material in public school classrooms, the reporter spent the first third of her article in near rhapsodic euphoria for the new technology. Her inference was that the use of e-textbooks is already so commonplace she need only tell the reader that they are great, rather than explaining how they have and are being developed or the ways in which they may be used.

Only after this unabashed endorsement of e-textbooks does the piece raise even a single balanced perspective that passes for what would be called journalism. The reporter accurately cites the fact that beleaguered state budgets and general destitution in this economy could make electronic textbooks an attractive future option for use in public schools. What she withholds for much of the article is that many teachers are unable to access even a single computer for their students let alone the kind of technology that would make possible a broad use of electronic textbooks.

The problems with pieces like the Times article are multifold. First and foremost they present the future as fact, narrowing our reckoning with the present and suggesting that new and untested technology are already wholly accepted, unalterable truths. By providing nearly no content, the piece leaves readers with something worse than an all or nothing proposal, simply suggesting that the reality it presents is so settled that there is nothing the reader can (or need) do to learn any more about the issue.

In actuality, e-textbooks are still quite a way off for most schools and that is a good thing. Their advent may offer tremendous advantages over current school textbooks. In the coming years I believe e-textbooks will become the only truly viable part of the e-book market, as the rest of the publishing industry shifts toward small, localized print-on-demand facilities. But their development and use will require the vigilance and assistance from parents, teachers, and scholars alike.

Articles like the one in the Times stilt progress. They are needlessly exclusive and ultimately appear to be advertisements rather than news. I rarely believe that complex conspiracies occur, so I am not suggesting that the reporter for the Times is part of an e-textbook plot to write positive pieces about the industry. Rather, what I am suggesting is that this kind of writing, in the volume that it can be found every day in major news sources, is dangerously sloppy and lazy. This kind of journalism has an incremental, lasting effect on how much individuals feel able to knowledgably contribute to the development of our society, and for that reason it needs to be challenged every single time it appears.

Alex Green is the owner of Back Pages Books and editor of Back Pages Publishers, both located on Moody Street in Waltham.