What is a textbook? To my understanding, it is a collection of various research presented in a fashion to teach the broad understanding of the field. Now, how do you improve this? Simply put, you make the information more assessable to multiple types of learners and levels. This way, more people will be able to access your text and wish to invest in it. Textbooks are a format and formats are very difficult to make ground breaking innovations on. Usually what occurs is a new format gets created. I do not feel that digitalizing textbooks is doing that. I feel it is simply adding new features to a already solid format. What I haven’t seen is a textbook that allows students to witness the conducting of the vary research the text is based on. This allied with text and interviews with researchers from the field would be what are needed for a new format. With out all this, we simply have improved the pictures in the old biology book.

This is not to downplay the innovations to text in general that have occurred over time. Many of these have been necessary for the education of mankind. Where would we be without the printing press, books, paper, digital text, or the alphabet? These are ground breaking; world making ideas that have done everything from discover atoms to putting a man on the moon. No major religion could exist without text and the scientific community would cease to exist if there was no publication. Text has traveled millions of miles; textbooks, however, have not.