Western textbooks, especially those which are mandatory to get for certain college classes are expensive, but that’s because of the IP and the small market. Best selling paperback books are already much cheaper per page. If you don’t take copy right into account, which you didn‘t do for the laptop either and also skim on paper and print quality, which is fair enough when comparing to the OLPC, then books are dirt cheap.
How cheap you can go in third world countries, I don’t know, but even our student union in Germany was selling self printed lecture scripts with good quality and a hundred pages and more for about 50 cents.
It costs about 0.5 cents per book to "print" 3,000 books to a retail-priced SD card, so paper books are still expensive by comparison. The only way paper is close to competitive is if the kids only get access to a couple of books, which is dumb if we're ignoring licensing.
