Last week in my class of 23 students, five students were unable to buy the book. The bookstore assured me that the books would be in by the end of the week. I scanned the reading for Thursday and posted it to the course web site (password protected). Today two students came to my office. One has ordered the book over the Internet and says it will be here in the next couple of days. The other says the bookstore ran out of copies again and his will be here tomorrow. Both wanted to borrow my book to make photocopies.

This happens every single semester, in every single class. 25% of the students do not have the book the first week. 10% still do not have it the second week. If the book is a recently new edition, at least one student will have an old edition and will want me to somehow fix the problem.

The thought that all my students could have the right book at the right time makes my heart leap.

It would also tend to change my model of text-selection. I like giving students choices and if I knew that everyone could get their books immediately I would let them vote on books for the second half of the course more often.

The textbook Kindle needs to have a couple of features:

1. It must not be textbook-only. Students need to be able to read all Kindle books on it. Some of us assign novels and other books that are not officially text books.

2. It should allow an easy method for teacher-delivered content. Currently I post all handouts to the pass-word protected web page, but students need to have an easy way to get it on the Kindle.

3. There will be a transition time and so books will have to be available on paper and Kindle. This means that there will have to be something like page numbers so that everyone can find the same place in the book for discussion.