How do you make school textbooks cheaper? The government has turned to a combination of old traditions and modern technology to beat book prices, considered one of the sources for the high cost of education in this country. Let's hope it works.

The new book policy, introduced in 2005 but for some reason still not widely known to the public, involves lengthening the shelf life of a book to a minimum of five years, buying up the copyrights of as many school textbooks as the government can afford and uploading them in digital form to the Internet and making them available for free download to those who need them.

National Education Minister Bambang Sudibyo, who explained the policy at a news conference on Friday, acknowledged there are bound to be winners and losers as a result of any new policy. In the case of the new book policy, the winners are parents and students through cheaper books. The biggest losers are book publishers and bureaucrats at the National Education Ministry who for years have colluded to make book prices expensive.

"There isn't going to be any monopoly over school textbooks. There isn't even going to be oligopolies," the minister said.

Extending the life of school textbooks to five years from the present one year would mean that books could be passed down to younger siblings, donated to poor families or sold to secondhand bookstores. The policy would also revive used textbook markets around the country.

Hand-me down books were the norm and secondhand book markets did brisk business until sometime in the 1970s when the government decided that schoolbooks were only good for one year. This meant that each year, publishers gleefully came out with new editions of each book and found a captive market with the help of the government. School textbooks became lucrative "projects", many of them funded with foreign aid.

But while book publishers prospered, parents had to buy new books each year for every child, and after the child went through these books, they were of no further use to anyone, not younger siblings nor poor kids in the neighborhood. These used books were only good for the recycling industry. Every year, each book was "revised and updated" even for subjects that don't change very often like mathematics and geography.

This was nothing short of robbery in the guise of education. That we allowed this scam to go on for decades shows how tolerant this nation has become of corruption. If this new policy means the closure of some of the country's largest book publishers, so be it.

Minister Bambang has gone one further in beating book prices, turning to the digital world to make books even more accessible and affordable to more people. The government has allocated Rp 20 billion (US$2.19 million) this year to buy the copyrights of widely used school textbooks and upload them to the Internet.

Students will then be free to download and print the books. The government is even encouraging people to print them out and resell them, knowing they cannot charge too much or people will simply turn to the original source. With the One Laptop For Every Child concept soon coming to Indonesia, perhaps there will be no need for anyone to print books, with e-books taking over.

Here is one example of how the Internet can help the government achieve its objectives: the dissemination of books. This wonderful technology has so many possibilities that have not been fully exploited for education and for governance.

Rather than fearing its impact on society and seeking to control or restrain the use of the Internet (as some other members of the Cabinet are prone to do), the government would do well to follow the National Education Ministry and maximize the use of this constantly evolving technology to improve services to the public.

E-government, it seems, is just around the corner.

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