Publishers such as Hodder Education already offer a range of online resources alongside conventional textbooks, and Pearson sells electronic versions of most of its textbooks, either in interactive form, or as a straight portable document format (pdf). Last year, Pearson earned £960m revenue from its digital products and services – around a fifth of its total revenue.

replicate. "You can flick back and forth in them quickly, you can scribble in them, it's easy to share one between a number of students," she said. "Though theoretically electronic textbooks can be much more interactive, the current reality is that a lot of them are little more than pdf versions of the paper book," she added. "A colleague of mine the other day got it right when he said that if you could invent anything that's as powerful as the book in the next hundred years we'll have done well."

"You can flick back and forth in them quickly, you can scribble in them, it's easy to share one between a number of students," she said. "Though theoretically electronic textbooks can be much more interactive, the current reality is that a lot of them are little more than pdf versions of the paper book," she added. "A colleague of mine the other day got it right when he said that if you could invent anything that's as powerful as the book in the next hundred years we'll have done well."