Smart ET textbooks: Why bind them at all

After briefly noting the characteristics of traditional textbooks, the author defines a smart textbook and compares it to the traditional text. Smart, in this context, is taken to mean imparting some human attributes or characteristics to the textbook. This is done by keeping the textbook´s author part of the teaching-learning process by having the teacher be the author. The emphasis is on using desktop publishing to enable the teacher to generate textbooks tailored to the students and the course. The process currently used by the author to generate a text for his course in applied physical metallurgy is described