What does it mean for educators to own their own content?

http://www.mercurynews.com/education/ci_20099854

First off, read this article. It does a fair job of covering Apple's costly plans to replace traditional textbooks in K-12 schools and beyond. What's scarier here for the obvious cost issues is this line here Noguchi writes, "Every year, the school district will have to buy more $14.99 textbooks that it will never own."

I've never considered myself a strict materialist; in fact, I think a widespread embracing of an economics and politics of virtualization and the intentions and extensions of a technologically extended body is an important and overlooked aspect of education, generally. I don't think that books need to be physical objects in the future of education. However, I'm wary that one company (Apple) may be making a bid to serve up a proprietary e-book format, only playable on their devices. While they may be offering a free book creation service, they will determine what e-books are "suitable" for their store, and what to reject.

We're quite possibly looking at the barrel-end of peer-reviewed scholarship here. If a profit-driven company takes hold of any exclusive fraction of the education market (an unfortunate trend already underway in universities), we're going to see severe drops in the quality of educational materials, hiding under the guise of self-publishing.

Educators and librarians need to be making a bid for open standards, be they HTML5, or some new standard. Why should we ever choose to adopt a proprietary standard from a single consumer electronics company? This is would be similar to a single paper company copyrighting the bookmaking process and putting a financial analyst and paper/ink/binding quality control person in charge of vetting any and all future educational publications.

We can't let one corporation determine (and have editorship over in their digital stores) what textbooks our children can access. Even if their devices get cheaper in time, their business model for education needs to be fought in order to preserve the diversity of ideas and opinions that we are trying to preserve in our collective pedagogy about and embedded within the world.