States Moving Toward Digital Textbooks

Stateline has a post on states adopting digital textbooks:

This year, Alabama’s legislature is considering a bill that would provide digital textbooks and tablet devices to all high school students, to be paid for with $100 million in bonds. The measure was approved in the House Education Policy committee at the end of February, but hasn’t made it to the House floor. If it does ultimately pass, Alabama would be only the second state to require the purchase of digital content. Florida became the first last year, when it moved to require that all schools spend at least 50 percent of their annual instructional materials budget on digital content by the 2015-16 school year...

But allowing districts to buy digital devices and content doesn’t guarantee that they will do it. In the 2010-11 school year, only 11 percent of Indiana districts actually made use of the blanket waiver, according to a survey conducted by the state Department of Education. “There’s a whole lot of moving parts to replacing textbooks,” says John Keller, assistant superintendent for technology in Indiana.