John Moore’s April 2003 editorial (1) suggesting that chemistry textbooks might be dispensable brightened my day considerably. To think that one day there might be no new chemistry texts produced, and thus my collection of old texts would become a priceless museum! It is mind-boggling.

Based on my general college chemistry (GCC) textbook collection, I have devised “Clark’s law”: P = exp(–17.25 + 0.0121D) where P is the total number of pages and D is the date published. Solving for D when P = 1 yields 1426. This, of course, is the date of Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press—the absolute zero of GCC texts. None could have been published earlier. As a further exercise the student should use Clark’s law to predict when printed GCC texts will be too heavy to pick up.

You may think this is a joke, but in Tennessee there is consideration of legislation for the state to provide dual textbooks to every student, one to leave at school and one to leave at home. This will reduce occurrences of “backpack back” according to Tennessee’s heavy thinkers.

Therefore I wish to partially agree with Moore’s ideas, but not to include the disappearance of the text. What will actually happen is this: The textbook content will continue to grow, but not on the printed page. Almost all of the digitizable material will be sold with the text, much as CDs are now, but probably in the form of solid state memory similar to the thumb-sized USB or Firewire drives now on the market. The actual paper text will be approximately 400 pages of clearly written chemistry instruction with few illustrations, tables, or distracting boxes. All the “boxes”, color pictures, tables, graphs, animations, movies, and software programs will be on memory chips that will be updated as new editions of the text appear. Small memory chips are almost indestructible, but of course are subject to being lost or to being carried too close to the NMR room. Perhaps college students will wear cartridge belts from war surplus stores with memory chips in each pocket.

A final bold prediction-there will be some students and faculty who will actually read a 400-page textbook! When was the last time you read an entire textbook?

Literature Cited

1. Moore, J. W. J. Chem. Educ. 2003, 80, 359.

Editor’s Note

This proposal is very similar (except for advances in available hardware) to one I made some time ago. See J. Chem. Educ. 1989, 66, 15-19.