Can someone save us from $200 textbooks?

The headline on this article puts it bluntly -- "$200 textbook vs. free.  You do the math."  The idea is that open-source material can someday replace textbooks as the main source of information in K-12 education and beyond.  With all the politics involved in textbook marketing -- Texas and California are the biggest K-12 textbook buyers and hence set the tone for textbooks around the country, and the Texas textbook board has taken a strong right-wing turn lately -- it may be time to think about using the Internet and tools like the iPad to their full capacity to transform education.  My only issue with using the open-source model to replace traditional textbooks is that textbooks only have space for so much material, whereas there is no limit on the Internet, so the best learning material may get lost in the sea of other information that is out there.  It is essential that we teach students how to read critically, and that we use the Internet as a tool of the trade in education, but we can't expect teenagers and younger students to be expert readers who will automatically understand the nuances of an open-source model.  We have to train them in how to read this material, just as we train them to read textbooks.