All the students in our local high schools who don't have their own laptops, or don't want to bring them to school, get Chromebooks. My wife's sister has gone paperless in her high school classroom. She's not the only teacher doing that. Chromebooks cost less than some textbooks now.
My children had quite a few college classes without traditional textbooks.
Culturally here in the U.S.A. we are always loathe to set up government agencies that are in direct competition with private industry, even when we should. Health care is the prime example. The result is we have the most expensive health care in the world and it's nowhere near the best, not even for wealthy people with "platinum level" insurance. Many of our textbooks fail in a similar way, or worse, are written so as not to offend the anti-intellectual rubes, racists, and religious cultists of shit-hole U.S.A.. History, biology, and health texts are especially crippled by this phenomena.
The primary focus of any K-12 history textbook should be the struggle for civil rights. The primary focus of any K-12 biology textbook should be evolution and the natural environment. The primary focus of any health text for middle and high school students should be frank and realistic education about sex and relationships.
My own middle and high school textbooks back in the anti-communist war days of the twentieth century were utter crap. I was fortunate to have a few teachers who worked around those limitations, but mostly I hated everything about high school and quit for college at sixteen. Thanks largely to my parents my curiosity and love of learning hadn't been extinguished.
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