Today’s biggest academic war — and who’s winning
May 19, 2009 by Carin FordPosted in: Special Report, Tech News
If this were Jeopardy, the answer might read: “This academic tool has been around for 500 years, but is slowly being replaced by its electronic counterpart.”
Can you guess the question?
There’s no Daily Double involved, but if you asked, “What is a book?” you’re right.
Is this an overstatement? Maybe yes, maybe no.
Take a look at these facts, and you be the judge:
- Princeton, Case Western, Reed, Darden School at the University of Virginia, Pace and Arizona State are partnering with Amazon to try out the Kindle e-book reader on their students.
- Missouri School of Journalism students will be required to buy an iPhone or iPod this fall, so they can electronically download course material.
- Columbia University added four times the number of electronic books to its collection this past year compared to traditional books.
While 99% of individual buyers still purchase traditional books, it seems the move of higher ed institutions toward e-books is picking up speed.
Amazon has purposely enlarged the screen of its new Kindle DX to accommodate textbook photos, charts and tables. The display is now 9.7 inches, more than twice as large as the old model.
Publishers who turn out scholarly works are beginning to omit footnotes and photos, so they can be better adapted to e-books. Textbook topics themselves are changing in order to become more cyberspace-friendly. Even electronic versions of scholarly magazines are steadily gaining ground.
Naturally, there are pros and cons to e-books:
- Pros: more immediate, searchable and interactive.
- Cons: not as durable, portable or – and this is a big one – affordable.
So where does that leave the future of the traditional textbook? Do you agree with the Columbia University librarian who says we’re in a “war for the access of information”?
Let us know your stand on e-books vs. textbooks in the comments section below.
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May 21st, 2009 at 1:35 pm
The problems w/ electronic books are the following:
1. The technology (or preferred technology) for reading them constantly changes.
2. They are not persistent in the same manner as a physical volume.
3. Scholarship is based on more than “textbooks.”
4. Libraries are the heart of the academy and contain many formats.
So at least to date, you can believe in education as the model to drive progress or
it would appear that some believe that capitalism should drive education.
Take your pick. John D. Berry, Librarian, U.C. Berkeley
May 21st, 2009 at 2:51 pm
I am an advisor at a large midwestern university. My students carry backpacks that weigh them down, and I worry about them getting stress injuries. So bring on the e-textbooks. I hope they do develop color for photos and graphics.
May 21st, 2009 at 2:56 pm
Cons: not as durable, portable or – and this is a big one – affordable.
The upfront cost of a kindle is what is prohibitive – I guess. but not as portable? I carry ONE device to all my classes instead of a book bag loaded down with 40 lbs of books? what’s not portable? I would argue ‘durable’ also – you have the digital book backed up and around pretty much for the next century. My old textbooks got moth holes after 10 years.
May 21st, 2009 at 3:30 pm
The “answer” for the Jeopardy-like qhestion is oversimplified. The book has been around far longer than the past 500 years. Only the book printed on a press using moveable type is as young as 500 years old. The codex format began replacing scrolls in late classical times.
As for the main topic, more and more may be published electronically, but the electronic version will never completely replace the book. Even if the text of a rare book is digitized and thus made available instantly around the world, the details of the published rare book such as paper quality and manufacturer, binding quality, quality and types of illustrations, will not be evident to the user of the electronic book without far more being placed within the ebook than its text.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I teach undergrad World History at Leeward Community College in Pearl City, Hawaii. Although I belong to Mesopotamian age, I try my best to learn some of the neotech-teaching. So, in the summer of 2007, with the help of a publishing company representative, I ordered an e-book. Most students, even the techies, did not like it at all. They complained of the cumbersome downloading, lack of connectivity in most places, not having a laptop everywhere they went or wanted, etc, etc.
E-books will work best for people who do not have the time to go to library or bookstore but they badly need to know something right away for research projects that are impossible to work on with websites. Or they need to know instantly what a particular author, researcher or theorists has just wrote.
For most college students price and ease are the two most important factors in how they will opt to get their book. Some professors have partially solved both problems by uploading articles on secure servers such as Blackboard for free. But to upload a complete book chapter by chapter and make it available to students for free may be the beginning of socialist education that is coming near you free of price!
May 21st, 2009 at 4:06 pm
Please correct typo at the end of the second last paragraph: theorists has just written.
Thanks.
May 21st, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Con. What will happen to average books and libraries that are available to everyone–poor or otherwise?
*Who will write books and textbooks if they can’t sell them? And you alluded to a change in style, “Publishers who turn out scholarly works are beginning to omit footnotes and photos, so they can be better adapted to e-books.” How will the accountablity and credibilty be verified and available (traceable) to readers.
*What are screens doing to eyesight–especially developing eyesight?
*And lastly, but most importantly to me, I like falling asleep with a book on my chest–if it falls off, then I lose my place, not break something. And I like to take books with me–on the bus, camping, while I’m waiting for a meeting to start…
May 21st, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Is this the future for Librarys? And if so, how far into the future are we talking about?
May 21st, 2009 at 4:36 pm
I’ve been a fan of digital media since the mid-80s when I bought my first computer to facilitate my dissertation research. By the late 80s, I was using a modem to teleport edited copy from NYC to Massachusetts for layout, printing, and distribution of the art history newsletter a group of friends and I produced. In the early 90s, I was the first person in my dept. at UVA to have the slides for a course digitized so students could easily review images I showed in class that weren’t in their textbook. I love my iPods and my iPhone. But when I read “publishers who turn out scholarly works are beginning to omit footnotes and photos, so they can be better adapted to e-books,” I am livid. How can work be “scholarly” if it omits the chief apparatus for documenting and, in some cases, elaborating upon the information and ideas in a text? How, in a supremely visual era, are scholars in fields ranging from science to history supposed to make a convincing case without using photos and other forms of graphic evidence? And it’s not even necessary! If anything, footnotes, photos and other graphics are EASIER to incorporate in e-texts than in analogue ones! This “trend” isn’t a response to technological imperatives. It’s an extremely short-sighted attempt to save money (by reducing the number of elements involved in text layout and design, hence eliminating jobs or downgrading the required skill set & resulting pay rate. . .) by cutting “corners” that are actually pillars of scholarly publication.
May 21st, 2009 at 9:32 pm
I actually think that e-books are a great idea for students for textbooks, if the program allows for highlighting, attaching notes, use accessibility modes etc. In Canada within years, there will be an accessibility in information law in effect which will hugely impact the educational system. Books in braille can take up to 6 months to be produced but an ebook which will read itself would allow institutions to comply with the act in a timely fashion. I still think that books are necessary for researching info – in many cases most of the students I know print off the articles etc that they need from the computer because it is so much harder to work with them
May 21st, 2009 at 9:49 pm
My biggest beef with E-books is the damage computer screen reading does to your eyes; it’s been proven you read faster off paper. Isn’t anyone worried about this? Also screen resolution for images doesn’t add up to fine lines per inch reproductions quite often.
The flicker rate on the screen causes problems with the bounce effect on your eyes and the flat screen resolution is still not up there.
My eyesight improves markedly when I’ve spent a few days off the screen!
Work has to happen in these 2 areas.
May 22nd, 2009 at 8:14 am
I wonder if anyone has considered the potential neurological impact of electronic text replacing the standard printed word. Many of our students (at a Student Accessibility Centre) listen to their etexts and I have often wondered if ther might be significant difference to the neurological activities of learning when electronic text (or listening rather than reading) replaces sitting down with a book.
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:56 am
There are three things that I feel are primary obstacles to more widespred adoption of ebooks, especially on something like the Kindle.
1) The inability to take notes on it (this does work though on a tabletPC, but then we’re talking more money)… I can’t highlight or make notes in the margins to refer to later, which is annoying.
2) Expense. Even though the Kindle may save money over a four year course of study, it means that many students will be toting around more electronic stuff (a Kindle and a laptop, for example), which is fine until one or both batteries run dead. Very few schools are equipped with anywhere nead enough outlets in rooms, and I would venture to say that even fewer students purchase extra batteries. Note too… if a student bought one of the newer HP tablets (around $1000), they could have both an ereader and a laptop in one box, but few schools are yet pursuing the tabletPC as an option.
3) The note in the story about publishers forgoing footnotes and such makes many “scholarly” publications less useful (if not completely useless) for other scholars, who then would not be able to look back at the citations used. Also, I do research in geography, so having no charts, images or maps would mean that avenue of publication would be pretty much unavailable. Also, how the heck would you publish most textbooks without these?!
May 22nd, 2009 at 9:59 am
One of the biggest costs of going to college besides the tuition is the textbooks. I remember one semester where I spent nearly $1000 on textbooks. You think that some of this money would be coming back to you at the end of the semester when you sell them back, but in some courses information is changing so quickly they need new versions of textbooks each semester leaving the previous semesters textbook obsolete (and so the bookstore won’t buy it back).
If Kindle or other elctronic devices provides textbook material at cheaper prices, why not. From what I seen, Kindle costs about as much as one textbook alone…and is reusable semester after semester. You just have to pay for the new information each semester which hopefully since publishers don’t have to pay printing costs for the textbooks…it would be significantly cheaper.
If this is true, than e-books have a great advantage over the more traditional textbooks.
May 22nd, 2009 at 1:30 pm
I hate reading on a screen. Hate it. Hate it. Hate it. I’m required to do it for much of my work but give me a book and a comfy chair any day.
That said, I don’t mind giving students a choice.
May 22nd, 2009 at 4:07 pm
As the Director of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies at Pacific University Oregon this is an issue I have been following for some time. My belief is that reading appliances (I use a Kindle2 in our labs) will get cheaper, and as electronic texts become dominant, books in turn will get more expensive. I think most scholarly books will be gone in twenty years at the most, replaced by electronic text read on the Kindle or the coming flood of its competitors.
There are just too many advantages for doing serious work in an appliance like the Kindle: the ability to insert notes and comments in the text, to clip and paste to manuscripts, etc. I wrote about these advantages in some detail in “To George Orwell: It’s the Kindle Baby, it’s the Kindle!” found at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2009/04/article.php?id=68
However, there are also many potentially unfortunate consequences to the widespread adoption of these devices. One is likely to be an even more rapid consolidation in the publishing industry and a marked reduction in the markets for written work. There are also very real implications for privacy and censorship. I write about the downside in “The Kindle: Is It 1984 Yet?” to be found June first at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/2009/05/
Pardon me for these self-serving references, but I really have been giving this issue a great deal of thought.
Jeffrey Barlow
May 26th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
As a piano professor at Canadian College, I am concerned the physical stresses associated with prolonged computer use are not being addressed in this discourse. Some of consequences of extended computer use that I’ve seen in my students include the exacerbation/creation of tendonitis and other RSI’s, back and neck tension/pain and severe eyestrain. This aspect of the e-text debate needs serious consideration.
June 2nd, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Didn’t know about it. Very nice information. Submitted this post to Google News Reader.