Future U is a multipart series on the university of the 21st century. We will be investigating the possible future of the textbook, the technological development of libraries, how tech may change the role of the professor, and the future role of technology in museums, research parks, and university-allied institutions of all kinds.

Textbooks are a thing of the past, says the common wisdom. Well, the common wisdom of the Technorati maybe. The problem with that thinking is that the number one publisher in the world is Pearson, a textbook publisher, who brought in $7.75 billion in 2009.

Pearson, as Tim Carmody noted in a January Wired article, owns 50 percent of the Financial Times, as well as the number two trade house: Penguin. The second largest textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, owns Standard and Poor’s. To say textbooks are big business is like saying bullets are ouchie.

So writing the obituary for textbooks would be putting the cart before the horse. But pretending like they are not changing their shape, if not their nature, is to proclaim, from one's buggy, that automobiles are a passing fad.

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was

Once upon a time, teachers imparted their knowledge through talking. Socrates famously used dialogue to inspire proprietary conclusions and correct misapprehension in his students. Socrates' student Plato taught in the Akadameia, an erstwhile olive grove outside Athens. An entire school of philosophers grew up around the walk-and-talk, the peripatetics.

Even as texts grew in importance, with the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Hebrews, talking still took precedence. Writing became more important but was restricted to a stick and some sand. With the Romans, it was a stylus on a wax tablet.

However, when printing took off in the 17th century—and was then followed by compulsory education in the nation states of the 18th—the textbook as we knew it was born.

Fast on the heels of that birth, the herd of educational cranks, publishing pimps, and politicians thundered into the room, and they’ve yet to leave. Textbooks became an industry, sometimes connected, often utterly unrelated, to education and to that waste product of education, the student.

The ecstasy of technophilia

A visit to a college classroom showed me the disconnect between the ecstasy of technophilia and what life actually looks like for students.

In Prof. Frances Cogan's freshman and sophomore research methodologies class at the University of Oregon's Clark Honors College, the most prominent tech was the spiral notebook. This was partially due to Cogan's resistance to the distraction of the technology.

"If I bring a laptop to class, I tend to get lost in Facebook," admitted Becky Hatch. But that's not the only issue.

"It's really hard to set up your laptop on those little tables," said Maggie Whitt, talking about the tablet chairs that still make up most university seating.

Some students, like Naomi Wright, still value the tactility of writing.

"I'm synthesizing a thing when I write it down," she said. "When I type it's like, in one ear, out the fingers."

Certainly there are students that bring technology to today's college classes, but there are fewer of them—and less tech—than you might think.

For one thing, the devices that would be easier to use both in class and out are expensive.

"An iPad would be good," said Megan Mandell, "but I can't afford one." And those who do use either e-readers or e-reading programs on tablets to carry the texts for a class often find them to be less than optimal, despite all the advertising to the contrary. Among other faults, the students said they find the ability to highlight and to make margin notes, acts they feel essential to their process of absorbing the information in the texts, is insufficient. Online texts are often difficult to navigate and have poor search functions.

So the purchase of old-fashioned physical textbooks continues apace—and at a high cost. One student spent $600 on her first term's books before she realized she could buy them, copy and make notes, read the assignments before the course had even started, and then return them for full price.

Navigating a changing environment while avoiding getting stung is part and parcel of how today's students relate to textbooks. Not just students, but instructors as well. "Professors have become much more sensitive to the cost of textbooks," said Whitt. "One professor went on a 20-minute rant on textbook expenses. He scanned all the texts for his class and put them all online."

Isn't that illegal?

"Yes!" the students chorused emphatically. But one insulation against possible lawsuits when copying, whether electronically or on paper, is to be scrupulous in including the citation page. Who wrote it, when, who published it, where.

What is illegal, Cogan clarified, "depends on what you consider 'scholarly use.'"

Another way some students avoid the debilitating cost of required textbooks? Torrents. By general acclamation, you can find any basic lower division textbook via unofficial, and illegal, online download services. (Torrenting is not just for music and movies anymore!) The more specialized texts, they said, probably not, but all the basics, certainly. "Our generation is kind of in flux with the tangible stuff of electronics," said Kaela Thomas.

"Children starting out learning on electronic sources may utilize it better," agreed Hatch, "but for people now, they grew up with pen and paper and book."

This generational flux is not thought of by these students as a revolution or a revelation, but as a development.

Cole Lendrum sees the textbooks of the future as being "more and more personalized." The textbooks that will be available to their kids will offer "more personalized formats."

Bring your own technology

Dr. Tim Clark, instructional technology specialist for the Forsyth County school district in Georgia, oversees one of the few primary school districts in the country that runs a BYOT program—bring your own tech.

This program turns students' smuggling various electronic devices into their classrooms inside out. Instead of being policed and suppressed, it is required, or at least encouraged openly. The proliferation of these devices has resulted in Forsyth's primary schools operating more like a university's upper division classes. Instead of required texts from a central source, pedagogical materials are assembled and formed around the needs of the specific classroom and its students.

"In most of our classes," Clark told Ars, "the textbooks we do have are left on the shelves, and we have reduced our spending on textbooks. The teachers are mainly bringing in content from materials available on the Internet, the teachers and students are producing their own content, and we provide some district-wide subscriptions to additional online content. Students and teachers are wanting relevant materials that are provided just in time rather than static textbooks."

The future Clark sees growing out of the experiences and expectations of his students is one of contribution, community, and collaboration.

"Student engagement and collaboration have increased in classrooms. The students work more in groups to participate in projects and activities. Even in our high schools, teachers are beginning to incorporate more group assignments and projects because either not everyone brings a device, or the devices are so different. This differentiation encourages collaboration. There is a stronger sense of community in the classroom."

"I think that the students [in the future] will be more accustomed to contributing to the body of knowledge within their classes rather than just being consumers of information."

Far, far away

When we think about anything technologically, we tend to default to our own area and our own experience. So when we think about the future of higher education, we tend to center on North America and Europe. It is far from the whole story.

Founded by former Amazon VP David Risher, Worldreader is a non-profit group that has spent several years testing the idea that e-readers can create a quantifiable improvement in literacy in the developing world. Starting with a pilot project in a Ghanan village, they expanded to a large project in Ghana's capital, Accra, then to Kenya, and, most recently, to Uganda. The e-reader projects have resulted in a verifiable increase in literacy in the communities targeted. Above all, this is a result of access.

Brian Schartz, who taught mathematics in a Botswanan village for several years, recalled the difficulty of getting books delivered to what stood for his school's library. You had to buy the books in the capital, then take the time and suffer the expense of having them delivered by truck through rugged territory.

What Worldreader's e-readers have proven is that you can deliver one box of e-readers and you've delivered an entire library to each student. Given the deals the organization has struck with both Western and African publishers to provide the texts free of cost to the students, the plan is cost-effective. Whether it is scalable is another question.

"I see a huge demand in the developing world for textbooks to be delivered electronically," Elizabeth Wood, director of digital publishing for Worldreader, told Ars. "We're working with our partner BinU to deliver the entire CK-12 series of textbooks on our app to meet the enormous need. We're also working with all our African publishers to digitize local textbooks as well. The fact that leisure books don't make it to the developing world is an awful problem that we're trying to solve, but textbooks? They're essential."

Wood believes the potential for e-textbooks to make a difference in the developing world's higher education landscape is enormous. The organization is currently working to develop partnerships with open source textbook developers, including OpenStax College, "to be able to make relevant materials available electronically to students all over the world."

And away we go

In much the same way that the classroom of the future is evolving away from the unidirectional transmission of knowledge via lecture and toward dialogue and project-based learning, the textbook is responding to the same strains. Like the classroom, the textbook is likely to become more collaborative and customizable.

The notion of the bound text being replaced by the e-book is not one that many people seem to be excited about. The limitations of the e-readers outweigh many of their benefits in the industrialized world, at least for now. In the developing world, however, the benefits may outweigh the drawbacks sooner than in the West.

It's not so much that the textbook is transmogrifying from lines of text on paper to lines of pixels on screens as it is undergoing a change of definition. A more exacting way to put it might be to say that textbooks are being replaced not by e-textbooks, but by curated collections of course-specific materials, some online, some on paper. In some cases, such as the Forsyth schools, the students themselves are building them.

The key overall, however—what makes the future of the textbook exciting—is someone, somehow, seems to have kicked the door off the hinges. We're on the verge of "anything goes." There is likely to be a lot of dross as a result, but the joy of discovery has energized something that is so often apprehended with a dull dread—the "textbook."