Buying "slices" of books for classrooms

Think back to when you were in school. A lot of the time, the teacher would assign readings out of a textbook throughout the year, then add a fair amount of classroom lecture, activities, and other supplementary material to help teach whatever the topic was. Out of the hundred or so classes I took in high school and college, most had a textbook. From my memory, we were assigned readings that made up maybe 50% of those textbooks, at most. A handful of classes used almost the entire textbook, and more than that ditched textbooks altogether. I feel like many of my teachers used textbooks because, well, that's just "what you do."

I have nothing against text books. If a teacher finds or writes a great textbook and wants to teach out of that book, great. I'm into it.

But if a teacher just wants to use a few readings out of a textbook, why should the students need to either purchase (in college) or lug around (in high school) the whole text book all year just to use a few chapters on select days?

Wouldn't it be great if the teacher could choose the sections students should read and extract them from the textbook, then email or hand out just those sections?

Enter SliceBooks, a new company based in Colorado trying to address this issue.

The basic idea is to help publishers sell pieces of content rather than the whole book. Ideally, everyone benefits. The publishers make more money off of content that isn't brand new without having to move the entire book, taking advantage of popular parts of older editions. At the same time, teachers and schools spend less money on getting that content.

Here is the basic idea from their home page:

• Slice
  Create ready-to-publish micro content like chapters, sections and pages
• Remix
  Mix and match slices to create custom ebooks
• Publish
  Sell on the Slicebooks Store or download

I think this sounds like a great idea. If I'm an English teacher, I can pull all of my favorite readings together and essentially create a reader specifically for my class, and all within the DRM laws.

What do you think of this approach? Have you seen anything like this in schools?

Image source: audio-luci-store.it via flickr