The "Digital vs. Printed" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Looking at a few stories dealing with the open campus program that has been started in Lancaster County that features three high schools that use digital textbooks.  The courses vary from one school to the next, but students from all three schools may participate and select a program that has been posted by any one of the high schools.  They are bypassing the big textbooks and finding free material to teach the online classes.  Many schools in my county are starting to use digital textbooks.  There is a company in California known as CK-12 that makes traditional textbooks obsolete.  Good or bad?  Well, for many students it takes that huge backpack off their back and gives them more space in their school locker.  The textbook content can be updated more often through the stroke of a few keys on a computer, saving the cost of new textbooks all the time.  The digital textbooks can be interactive with not only student, but parent involvement.  Teachers can check to see if students have been logging on to the Internet to do their homework as well as answer questions that students may have while online.  My concern with the digital textbooks deals with the negative or minus aspects of them.  Who pays for the computers that all the students are going to need to access the online courses.  I'm sure everyone doesn't have a laptop or notepad to use.  Will inter-city schools be able to afford the digital textbooks and laptops?  And, aren't the computers more costly than a traditional textbook?   McGraw-Hill, one of the USA's largest book publishers says that they still have to pay for the rights to use the information no matter if it is online or in print.  They don't have to pay for the printing, binding and shipping of the textbooks, but they still have to pay for their workers to write the programs and continually update the material.  Now, my biggest concern is in the last sentence I wrote.  Both my sons are in the printing business.  They both are pressmen who supervise the running of large web presses that produce printed material.  How safe is their job if more and more schools decide to eliminate traditional textbooks?  Will technology put them on the job-hunting line?  I know that printing will never totally disappear.  Many now read their newspaper online, but there are still a large percentage, including myself, that enjoy sitting in my easy chair while reading the news.  Printed paper legal documents will not vanish too quickly either.  I just read that the local high school newspaper just went online and I wondered to myself what will become of the yearbook.  I just don't see that disappearing.  Having a digital version of the yearbook would make it hard for students to sign it.  And it's quite a bit harder to lose a large yearbook than it is a CD that by the time you want to look up a classmate for your 25th class reunion, the digital format will have changed at least a dozen times.  So, please keep those presses running.  It's my wish for the future of the printing trade.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.