More good news on the education front: remember a couple of days ago when we mentioned that the state of Maine was having trouble scraping together enough funding to extend its unprecedented every-middle-school-child-gets-an-iBook program into its high schools? Worse yet, even its Plan B wasn't taking off; the idea was to let the schools sign up to participate and foot the bill themselves, but even after getting Apple to agree to provide its original $300-per-student-per-year price (calculated for a lease of 38,600 iBooks) for a severely reduced minimum quantity of just 8,400 iBooks, Maine still couldn't get enough of its high schools to agree to pony up the cash.

"Wait," you say, "$300 per student each year? But an iBook with an AirPort Extreme card normally only costs a high school $1,020, and provided a school successfully puts the fear of death into its students so they take care of the equipment, it shouldn't have much trouble making those iBooks last for three or four school years. So that doesn't sound like all that great a deal for Maine." Well, okay, fair enough, except that Apple's price to Maine "includes servers and repairs" and "training and [assistance] in installing the wireless networks that link the computers." Given that high school kids rarely fear death and will likely be using those iBooks as boogie boards within a week, we're guessing that the repair bill alone may mean that Apple doesn't get much out of this transaction, financially speaking.

What's more, Apple's either really committed to bettering the educational experience of our nation's children, or it's really desperate to grab as much education market share it can in an era when Dell is regularly kicking its hinder up and down the school halls, because according to an Associated Press article, the program is moving forward after all-- now that Apple has agreed to lower its "minimum participation level" to just 6,000 units. Sure, that's still a pretty big order as far as education purchasing goes, but it's nowhere near the volume of the original middle school deal. Nor does it have the coverage: it only puts Macs in "roughly one-third" of Maine's public high schools.

Nevertheless, it's still good news in that six thousand more impressionable young State o' Mainers will get to learn with the help of an iBook, and we're all for that. There's just one potential snag, of course: Maine will soon find itself in a situation in which all of its public school eighth-graders will be used to iBooking their way through the learning experience, but only one in three will get to keep the iBooks in high school. Do we sense an impending class war between the haves and the have-nots? Or maybe even whole schools raiding, sacking, and pillaging adjacent schools for their sweet iBook booty?

For the sake of our ratings, let's hope so. Fingers crossed!