South Korean Textbooks to Go Digital by 2015 123
South Korea plans to spend $2.4 billion buying tablets for students and digitizing materials in an effort to go completely digital in the classroom by 2015. From the article: "This move also re-ignites the age-old debate about whether or not students learn better from screens or printed material. Equally important, there's the issue of whether or not devices with smaller form factors are as effective as current textbooks, which tend to have significantly more area on each page."
Re:digital rights (Score:5, Informative)
I am an expat who lives in South Korea. I have never seen a K-12 textbook which costs more than 8,000 won (~$8 USD). In fact, I have about five middle school textbooks on my shelf from the current year, and they only cost between 1,000 and 3,000 won each. Oddly, the "international" textbooks (read: American textbooks simply labeled as "Not for sale in the US.") actually cost about half of what they would back home.
Sadly, you get outside of textbooks, and the prices for English books are pretty costly.
Re:digital rights (Score:2, Informative)
Korean public schools don't reuse textbooks. They are purchased new every year by the students. They're ridiculously cheap, too. They get filled with study notes over the course of the year. (I'm an expat teacher.)