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There's been some dispute to these numbers. Lee Wilson, a veteran of the education industry, blogged exhaustively that Apple e-textbooks actually cost six-to-seven times more than print textbooks. Using estimated data from his own experience and from technology directors, he determined Apple textbooks cost $71.55 per student, per class, as opposed to $14.26 for print textbooks. He factored purchase of the devices into cost. (I urge you to read his post, and his follow-up, and judge the numbers yourself.)

Either way, if the price tag for iPads and e-textbooks ends up being too costly and districts aren't seeing much of a different from their print past, meeting Arne Duncan's digital textbook goals may be tough.

1. It has been predicted that 44 percent of college textbooks will be digital by 2017. 2. Florida is making K-12 textbooks completely digital by 2015. 3. Even the federal government is taking a strong stance — it released the “Digital Textbook Playbook” to show districts why and how they should make the move toward e-textbooks. 4. The transition to digital content is undeniably taking place in classrooms and on campuses, and will only accelerate in coming years.

2012 Q2 Special Report: The Textbook Reformation & Digital Content

Converge 2012 Q2 Special Report Supplement: Funding and Professional Development

One reason why paper textbooks cost so much is because publishers need to recover their costs of producing new books in the first or second semester, Brady said. That's because the books end up in the used book market after that time, where publishers don't get a cut. And digital textbooks have kept a similar high-priced model, he said, which encourages students to break the encryption on them or stick with paper books because they can sell them back.

And videos, of course, can't be printed.

By using the HTML5 online content language, Brady hopes to give students cheaper instructional books that will give them all their material in one place. And the material will be updated in near real time.

"It wasn't the music business that was dying," he said. "It was the CD business." Similarly, the textbook isn't necessarily going away, said Bridges, but the form is definitely changing.

"We are already producing online materials that school districts can't even use fully because of the challenges they have [with professional development and infrastructure,]" said McFall. But while schools may not quite be ready to make the transition to fully digital content, the revenue from digital resources grows each year, and currently makes up more than a third of Pearson's sales, said McFall.

As of now, of the students using Boundless at more than 2,000 campuses, 95 percent said they were able to achieve the grade they wanted—or better—and 88 percent said they would use Boundless again.

the market for interactive textbooks is taking off (Kno, one of the biggest publishers of e-textbooks, has compiled enough data from extensive use of its platform to publish data on student effectiveness), iPads are everywhere, the Kindle Fire is seeing significant adoption, and Google's Nexus 7 already has solid retail and pre-order traction outside of the technorati who usually represent Google early adopters.

The Pearson Foundation sponsored the second-annual survey, which asked 1,206 college students and 204 college-bound high-school seniors about their tablet ownership.

One-fourth of the college students surveyed said they owned a tablet, compared with just 7 percent last year. Sixty-three percent of college students believe tablets will replace textbooks in the next five years—a 15 percent increase over last year’s survey. More than a third said they intended to buy a tablet sometime in the next six months.

tablet owners more than quadrupled among college-bound high school seniors during the past year, with 17 percent surveyed this year claiming a tablet device as their own.

It also more than tripled among college students, with a quarter of this year's respondents owning a tablet.

69 percent of high school seniors and 63 percent of college students said they believed tablets would effectively replace textbooks within five years,

1. Adaptive instruction

2. Playlists

3. Alternative ways to learn: