BIG WHOOP? Education Secretary Arne Duncan and FCC chairman Julius Genachowski want every student to have an e-textbook by 2017. (Taking a cue from South Korea?) To start, they've released a 67-page "playbook" to ease schools' (presumably painful) transition to ebooks. Audrey Watter's response: "ugh." To be more specific, she isn't swayed by pro-digital textbooks arguments built around "the lighter weight" and interactive claims. This argument is moot, however, asserts NPR's Monkey See blog, which would prefer if everyone just shut up and so refrained from making black-and-white, either/or propositions about the future of books.
