Technology has long been employed to improve teaching and learning, although not always so efficiently and cleverly as one might wish. Advances in the teaching paradigm have sometimes reinforced outmoded, obsolete, and simply incorrect practices and prevailing understanding of the organization of knowledge. Today, technology presents education in general and the textbook in particular with a set of opportunities and challenges scarcely dreamed of by earlier authors. While it is commonly accepted that the textbook remains an important element in the learning process, there is less agreement on its efficacy in that process. While textbooks are frequently perceived as repositories of received wisdom, modern scholars have pointed out that their use as facilitators of learning has many shortcomings. Nevertheless, the textbook continues to occupy a critical place in organized pedagogy from kindergarten to graduate school, serving as the proxy for what is to be learned. It is the default position for certainty in many disciplines. Because of this central and critical role, the authors discuss the future of the textbook. In discussing the future of the textbook, the authors find it useful to consider the role educators are asking textbooks to play in the pedagogy of the 21st century. They suggest that this reconsideration may usefully proceed from juxtaposing old conceptualizations of the textbook with possible new ones. The authors present a list of present and future conceptualizations of textbooks and briefly consider each of these points. (Contains 1 table.)