Google + Schwarzenegger terminating textbooks together

According to a news article on ABC News (PDF Calif. to Dump Printed Text..), Governor Schwarzennegger is trying to trim the state’s budget gap with a cheaper alternative to the traditional high school textbooks. California has a US$24.3 billion budget shortfall to face. How much is a billion? If we wanted to pay down a billion dollars of the US debt, paying one dollar a second, it would take 31 years, 259 days, 1 hour, 46 minutes, and 40 seconds. Now multiply that by 24 and you get roughly 761 years! This is just a single state’s deficit, and The Age reported that Arnold refused to increase taxes in order to fill the void. The former actor’s plan to save money pivots around phasing out hardcopy school textbooks in favour of learning over the internet.

While the Terminator star plays with the politics, let’s look at some aspects of information access and learning over the internet. I went back to the books (and blogs) and since then, most of my learning is via each university’s implementation of the Blackboard application, and readings which are scanned into the institution’s online library. Limited (so far) study resources can also be found within Google Books, such as this title on focus groups.

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

http://www.google.com/corporate/

Upon reading the CNET News article Google’s digital book future hangs in the balance, one quickly finds that Google stands to make huge sums of money from advertising, book search, institutional subscriptions for access, and selling PDF copies of books. Did anyone check if Arnold has any investment in Google? If you’re also concerned over the legal issues, check out the groundbreaking agreement between authors, publishers and Google Books.