E-textbooks not ready for college students yet?
6 Lessons One Campus Learned about E-Textbooks is the headline over Jeffrey R. Young’s article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. But perhaps it should read instead, “E-textbooks not ready for college students yet, at least in many cases.”
Northwestern Missouri State University used the Sony Reader in a pilot study and, according to Young, found that students demanded printed books instead because of navigation problems with E.
Mind you, this wasn’t with the new PRS-700, which lets you use a stylus to move around. So maybe the results would have been different.
Kindle DX: Will lack of a stylus hurt it on campus?
But remember, the new Kindle DX lacks a stylus, so I’ll be curious if similar navigation issue arise. We’ll be finding out soon enough since the DX is officially shipping June 10.
Another issue could be the lack of color, a capability which might be handy for charts, not to mention other illustrations. At least the Northwestern Missouri students shown above are using laptops, with color screens.
Meanwhile here’s a list of the six lessons:
- “Judge e-books by their covers.” Hardware and software count, in terms of interfaces. The university’s results were less than stellar even when it switched to VitalSource software, which runs on laptops. Remember, laptops let you move the cursor and do plenty more than with a Kindle-style device can.
- “Learning curves ahead.” One student told Young: “They should have a week in class where they explain how to use it."
- “Professors are eager students.” Rather than the hoped-for five or six profs, more than 50 volunteers for one experiment.
- “Long live batteries.” Some students needed to tether their machines to outlets in lecture halls because their batteries ran out. Of course, E Ink machines last longer. And I’d note that netbooks and other hardware using Mary Lou Jepsen’s new screen technology also will get more life out of their machines—she hopes that her PixelQi displays will show up in netbooks later this year.
- “Subjects are not equally e-friendly.” Beware if you’re working with numbers and equations, especially if the content is displayed in small fonts. Of course, as I see it, maybe the right software could simplify things. One lesson from Northwest Missouri was that color significantly improved the effectiveness of illustrations. Will the Kindle DX’s monochrome be a major liability in some situations? Depends. English Lit is different from, say, biology.
- “Environmental impact matters.” Students did feel that E was better for the environment, and according to Young, “administrators said they were surprised at the degree to which such consciousness affected students’s opinions.”
- So how does Northwest Missouri State University’s president—a Kindle owner—now feel about e-textbooks? Well, Dean L. Hubbard stil thinks they’re inevitable. But it’s clear he thinks the tech isn’t quite there yet. Meanwhile Northwestern Missouri has appointed a successor to Hubbard, who’s retiring after 25 years in office; so it’s far from clear how things will turn out there.
One lesson I’m picking up: It’s high time that publishers gave the IDPF more money and other resources to refine e-book standards to improve usability, such as through improved navigation. We’re talking dollars and cents here. Don’t rely on Amazon—which looks out strictly for Number One—to set standards for the industry.
Another lesson for educators: Phase in E carefully, and, as noted above, think about differences between subjects. I’d suspect that English Lit would lend itself far, far better to e-textbooks and other e-books than most other subjects—just so it was easy for students and professors to find and sync their places within books. Shared annotations would also be good. Too bad that the IDPF has yet to come up with an industry standard for shared annotations.
As for the ePub Interop Group mentioned in comments accompanying a TeleRead post, I’m rooting for it to come up with workable standards for shared annotations if the IDPF won’t. But Google shows no messages posted later than April 3 from the group on any subject. What’s going on, or not going on?
June 8th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Your comment on classroom syncing of devices and screens triggered the thought that maybe something like Google Docs, Google Wave, or Zotero (especially the Zotero notebook) would be great for this. Texts would be online, all students in any class would ’share’ those texts, and in class discussions the prof’s laptop would be connected to a big monitor or projector, and the students would be online also. Each student or the professor could point out notes he had made, navigate to a specific page, and so forth — and everybody else would see the same thing on their screens. In addition, everybody’s notes would be able to be shared; at least in a Zotero demo of their Notebook app, you can share everything or just some notes, recordings, and so forth.
It will take a good 20 years for higher-ed to ‘digest’ all these changes. That’s probably enough time for publishers to catch up.
June 8th, 2009 at 11:15 am
This was a great piece written by the Chronicle for Higher Education. I think it is just a matter of time before students begin to be more receptive to ebooks. There is a great list of all your options available for textbook buying and selling here: http://www.textbookpower.com/category/national-text-exchanges/ — let me know what you think and leave a review of any services you have used.
[Editor's note---just to be clear: The above site is the comment writer's, as you'd guess. Looks like an interesting site, though, at first glance.]
June 8th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
It’s also a good argument for dedicated reader designers to think about student use when creating their hardware. A few tweaks to a few of the readers would probably create a fantastic reader for many, and there’s no reason we can’t have dedicated readers that are optimized for student use.
June 9th, 2009 at 1:41 am
It looks to me like this was a study destined to fail. For academic purposes a larger screen, easier non-linear navigation, annotation capabilities and some way to share or collaborate are needed. Also, for many classes, color is needed. A dictionary lookup feature would be sorely missed as well.
This is not pleasure reading of strictly fiction. This is academic use, which has greater requirements.
June 10th, 2009 at 2:07 am
I have stated elsewhere that I believe textbooks should be Open and Free. I think there are a number of advantages to this.
A bundle of open (Public Domain or Creative Commons licensed) works would allow:
Easy conversion to the device reqirements of whatever the student has on hand (laptops, PDAs, phones, etcetera)
The ability to print all (POD) or some (copy shop) the information the student might desire on paper
Easy and unfettered sharing of excerpts, images, or any other information associated with the book
Larger, more useful, and more detailed images, charts, and maps than would be available on paper
Links to other relevant sources of information
Protect students from monopoly rents commonly charged by copyright holders (thieves who believe in concepts like “intellectual property”)
Allow students to annotate and share annotated versions of texts or even new remixes of the texts to aid others in the uptake of this information (after all, teachers and authors are not the only people with good ideas about how to learn and memorise)
Protect students from the shortcomings of myopic programmers (few programmers have the ability to predict all the requirements of a piece of software they write, and such requirements change over time in response to cultural changes and user needs)
Give students the best of both worlds: paper and plastic
Once again, these students have already paid the schools for an education. The taxpayers have already paid these schools to educate society. Why are students paying extra for commercial books?
Why, indeed, do text books need copyright as an incentive anyway? The incentive to produce text books is clear: without them, teaching is much more difficult. Textbooks, like recipes — which are certainly not subject to copyright — carry their own incentive and do not need an additional monetary one. Books like the Norton Anthologies are uncopyrightable collections of Public Domain works. Why do these textbook publishing houses exist at all?
June 10th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Um… to make money?
LuYu, although your ideas are very idealistic, until you figure out an alternative way to make sure people get paid for the work they do, you can’t expect publishing houses to simply do all that work and give it away for nothing.
To make textbooks “free” to students, we’re talking about radical changes in the way books are produced, who produces them, and how that effort is financed. You’re probably talking about having government take over the book production process altogether, essentially telling ed publishing houses their services are no longer required, and building new materials, formats and relationships with all school systems, literally from scratch. That’s not going to be a quick and easy thing to pull off.
As for the study, I think its best conclusion is that every student should have a laptop to view e-books on, in whatever app best suits them.
June 11th, 2009 at 8:47 am
(Oops!) I accidentally reposted the link to the 6 lessons article, not realizing it was the same as the link here. The duplicate article is now deleted.