Mark Crane put forth an interesting possibility for digital textbooks in TechRhet Daily Digest Volume 2: Issue 74: “I’ve been thinking about ways to swap “playlists” of favorite online readings as a sort of virtual textbook, and it occured to me that social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us and wurldbook might be a way to start to do this. For example, if you collected a series of links related to technical writing, you could publish that “playlist” to a service like del.icio.us and tag the readings as “tech comm” or “tech comm reader” or something for other people to use via a single url, perhaps.”
Mark’s idea is very exciting because it suggests a direction the future textbook might take as it learns to incorporate the vast and ever-expanding body of scholarship available on the web. An ephemeral “links” list could also be attached to a more durable body of content, like an ebook. The electronic textbook could offer these “playlists” as a dynamic index which would be continuously updated by the user community.