“Over the next few years, textbooks should be obsolete,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on Oct. 2 in his remarks to the National Press Club. As tablet use both in and out of the classroom ticks upward, state governments, textbook publishers and tech companies are jumping on the digital textbook bandwagon. In January, Apple released the holy grail of education technology—slick, easy-to-navigate iPad textbooks that integrate video, photo and interactive graphics—and Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung and Google have all made advances into the industry as well. The benefits of digital textbooks are clear: they are more engaging, easy to customize and integrate with social networks, and can be updated more quickly than dead-tree books—and perhaps even save school districts money in the long run. But as cool as these new-age textbooks are, the hurdles to overcome are even bigger: many districts don’t have the money—or the mandates—to make digital books available to all students. (Voters in Idaho just defeated a ballot initiative that would have given every high-school teacher and student a laptop.) But those issues won’t be around forever. “The world is changing,” Duncan said. “This has to be where we go as a country.”