Up until now, the reports of the death of the textbook industry have been greatly exaggerated. Remember when the PDF was going to change everything? But this week, I have seen a couple of really cool stories that have convinced me that the traditional market for textbook is in its last days.

The first story is the preview of Plastic Logic’s new electronic-reading device, which premiered at this year’s DEMO conference. You can watch the five-minute demo below.

While similar to Amazon’s Kindle, which was launched last year, Plastic Logic’s e-reader is made from plastic instead of glass. That makes it lighter, thinner, and more durable. But what really sets it apart from the Kindle is that it’s open. The Kindle is a closed system. The only content I can read on a Kindle is content that Amazon makes available. That stinks. I want to determine what I read on my e-reader. I want to read my documents, my reports, my PowerPoint presentations. If I have a digital copy of a book, magazine, or textbook, I should be able to upload it to the e-reader. Plastic Logic lets me do that.

The second story that helped seal the fate of the textbook industry comes from WNYC’s On the Media. It’s an interview with Preston McAfee, an economics professor at the Californina Institute of Technology. Dr. McAfee was unsatisfied with the intro-to-economics textbooks on the market, so he wrote his own, and then he did something really cool. He licensed his textbook under the Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use the book for noncommercial use. Dr. McAfee hopes that other economists will add to the book, improving it, and thus create an open-source textbook. If it works for software, why not textbooks?

You can listen to the whole interview here:

I see the combination of these two ideas really changing the textbook industry. The e-reader eliminates the need for a physical object, and the Creative Commons open-source textbook eliminates the expense of the content. In addition, it allows faculty to create a textbook that is unique and tailored specifically for each individual class and that can actually be updated and revised during the quarter. It makes me want to go back to school.