I have just been watching, for the 4th or 5th time, the Bloomberg Channel’s Game Changers story of Steve Jobs.

The thing that got me thinking again about the very high price of student text books was Steve’s implementation of i-Tunes: 99¢ a tune, or forget it.

Steve Jobs and Apple had both the hardware – the iPod – and the software – iTunes – to pull this off.

Here’s what I wish for student textbooks (and I am talking particularly mathematics texts, which I know most about, but the same seems to apply to all fields of study):

1. Textbooks are free to students, or very inexpensive: maybe 99¢ a chapter.

This would, for example, bring Stewart’s Calculus, a book of 18 chapters with a list price of $224.95 , down to $17.82.

And because Calculus I students do not need the entire book in the first semester of calculus, they would pay only something like $6 for the first semester. If they continued to Calculus 2 and 3 they would pay another $6 in each of the following two semesters.

2. Textbooks have ads targeted at, and useful to, the students who are using the texts.

On what sort of things are school kids and college kids going to spend their money?

Uhm, let’s see: phones, clothes, music, computers, video players, CDs, DVDs, calculators, ….

If you’re over 25 years old you will probably see this as grubby commercialism. The 18-22 year-olds I have surveyed – informally – think this idea is GREAT: “Are you kidding?” they ask. “A really cheap textbook that gives us ads for things we want? That’s great!”

So get over it: kids will happily accept ads, especially for things they are interested in, over having to pay more than $200 × 4 = $800 each semester on books they don’t read, or – worse – not buying the books at all because they are too expensive.

3. Textbooks are e-books, readable on iPads and Kindle.

There’s a couple of reasons for this.

First, one small, lightweight, device, can hold all those heavy textbooks.

Sure an iPad might cost $420. But that’s less than what students, or their parents, are expected to pay for just 2 paper textbooks.

Oh, yeah, and with an iPad you can surf the Web and send and receive email, and here’s all them there app thingies, where you can check stuff and order pizza.

It’s not rocket science folks.

Second, on an iPad – and maybe even a Kindle – we can have Google Ads, or Amazon ads. or ….?

These are ads targeted to the readers and the subject matter.

4. The content authors – the dudes who write the content – get paid from the advertisers.

The more popular and useful their content, the more dollars they pull in from the advertisers.

Just like what happens now, except that the publishers, distributors, booksellers, and printers are not making fistfuls of dollars from the sales of texts.

Maybe there’s some snappy designers in the mix who make a buck.

5. The winners have to be students, and their parents (= bankrollers).

They will pay much less for the same high quality product – maybe even better quality because nothing would stop content providers – the authors – and their design partners – inserting videos directly into e-texts.

6. I want to know how we can make this happen.

We can begin with one content area (I would start with mathematics, surprise!)

We need some authors, willing to take a chance; some designers willing to do the same; some technical guys to get the content onto the devices; and some marketing people who know about Google Ads, Amazon ads, and other e-based advertising.

Then we need to target a particular market – say calculus – and figure out how to get students and their parents, to INSIST that their teachers adopt these sexy, cheaper e-texts.

If Egyptian people can get rid of a dictator, students can reform recalcitrant professors and teachers.

How can we do this?

Who’s willing to give it a shot?