The same idea could apply to many other countries. S upporters range from William F. Buckley, Jr., to the founder of CompuServe's forum on Afro-American culture, and the proposal appears in an information science collection from The MIT Press and the American Society for Information Science. U nlike most educational plans, TeleRead would help business directly and even reduce federal bureaucracy. In effect it would help shift resources from paperwork to learning. And in an increasingly complex economy, we need to foster life-time learning.
T V has a role.
But books do not display well on television TV screens are too large, and the shapes and resolutions are not right. And few computers are fit for reading books hours after hour. Many people would rather stretch out on the floor or the couch. P erhaps a quarter of textbooks in use are a decade years old. What's more, a survey by the Association of American Publishers and the National Education Association found that 38.6 percent of teachers say that at least some of their students lack textbooks to take home.