Making books and other materials available online is a first step but am concerned about the quality of the content. Many times the books were not clear about the point they are trying to make, the experiment how its performed, etc. They often added some content, especially towards the end of the chapter, which was just a paragraph or so and did not explain what it is. Other thing is that students don't get to know about the practical applications. Consider calculus or binomial theorem, most of the students as well as teachers don't know about its applications. Unfortunately, if your teacher isn't that good, you would not understand and appreciate the subject. Given that internet is still not widely available, the students cannot search for additional material or get their questions answered.
Trite, I know, but I feel this follows a similar argument to the one given for electric cars:
Right now, individual ecars don't help the environment because we still have inefficient sources of electricity. But, if everyone has an ecar, we would see huge increases in efficiency when we upgrade our power stations to green energy. 1 wind power station could affect 1000s of car drivers.
So if everyone has access to these books, an upgrade of the book could have a positive effect for millions of students..
Textbooks + Video Annotations (ala Khan Academy) really do the job of individual custom learning of a curriculum. So, your step 4, multimedia annotations. Profit may not the appropriate word, it would be rightly Profit/Benefit.
