Interesting article in the Sunday edition of the New York Times — the only edition I have time and inclination to read each week — about the demise of the physical textbook in schools. As reporter Tamar Lewin notes, this is not just a story about the reading habits of the post 2.0 generation. There’s a clear economic argument for supporting the move to digital:

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger this summer announced an initiative that would replace some high school science and math texts with free, “open source” digital versions.

And given that students already get so much information from the Internet, iPods and Twitter feeds, he said, digital texts could save them from lugging around “antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks.”

This is a refreshing take on the paper-versus-bytes debate that usually puts paper on the side of protecting jobs and the economy. And that’s because the protagonist in this story is the tax-paying public and their children, not the publishing industry that serves the public. Of course, the irony here is that the story is published in The New York Times, which continues to lose readership, revenue, and physical pages. When I picked up the Sunday edition this morning I was shocked; it was almost as light as the daily edition from years back. These are painful times, but as the Times article today suggests, there’s a bright side to the story about digital publishing that’s worth exploring. We’ve known that all along, but let’s thank the Times for the reminder. And note: the Times goes into the general topic of the future of news in great detail today. See the Sunday magazine article, “What’s a Big City Without a Newspaper,” which looks at the situation in Philadelphia, the city “that could end up being the first without a daily.”

Check out the discussion on Techmeme.