As a followup from the Kindle post I came across this NYT article on the ever rising costs of textbooks and a pending bill in Congress to force publishers to unbundle the CD-ROM and other add-ons that help drive up the cost. This is a wonderful idea at the core- I've barely even looked at most of the CDs that come with the General Chemistry books I have used in the past and when I have sat down and evaluated them I've been highly unimpressed. Most suffer from "Powerpoint syndrome"; just because you know how to do fades and wipes in Director doesn't mean you should. The thing that always surprised me the most was how limited they were- you'd think in a high-tech resource you'd have clear, large videos, useful 3-d models and the like, but videos always seemed to be 320x240, 10 fps at best with horrible compression artifacts and the 3-d models were more limited than what the free plug-in Chime can do.
Perhaps a free textbook option (FWS or Textbook revolution) might actually work? I still haven't chosen a base text (or even know if I will) for my seminar next year- too bad FWS won't be ready yet.
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