To no one’s surprise, one of the big stories out of the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show was the number of electronic book devices introduced. (The RIT Open Publishing Lab has a round-up of related announcements from CES about these devices.)
We seem to be in a very transitional stage with regard to these devices: while the black-and-white e-ink display of the Amazon Kindle is–by all reports–a very satisfying reading surface, other manufacturers are trying to edge into the market dominated by the Kindle through the introduction of other options such as dual displays of color LCD alongside black-and-white e-ink. These innovations are, frankly, more than a little awkward in some cases and don’t seem likely to change the playing field, but they are evidence that we’ve yet to arrive at a standard electronic form that everyone (consumers, publishers, programmers, hardware manufacturers) can agree on.
To complicate matters even more, Apple is expected to introduce a tablet next week, and this week (perhaps anticipating what said tablet is expected to be able to do) the news from Amazon is that the Kindle will be getting an app store (a concept first popularized by the Apple iPhone), allowing developers to create digital tools beyond those that facilitate reading on what is so far the most successful electronic book device.
Okay, fine. Clearly there’s a great deal of entrepreneurial innovation at work with regard to the devices with which (through which? on which?) we are reading. But what about content? Specifically, what about content for the higher ed classroom?
Here’s what I want to know: with all the devices that students already own, why aren’t there more good quality teaching materials available in an electronic format that will do the things we usually expect texts to do in a relatively standard way: consistent page numbering, highlighting, annotating, sharing/loaning/re-selling? And why don’t the electronic texts we do have access to allow us to do things like remix, create word clouds, print out our own copies, and search & sort? Granted, I have my own tentative answers to these questions, but I’m mostly interested in hearing from ProfHacker readers about their thoughts on these issues, as well as whether or not there’s perhaps a general consensus out there that digital textbooks (whether published in an open access format or as copyrighted content) are a desirable goal.
What do you think?
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4 Responses to E-readers, Textbooks, and Education
Kristin - January 21, 2010 at 2:24 pm
I have a recently purchased Kindle that I absolutely love, but I sure wish there were more academic content available. And I don’t just mean textbooks, although that would be fabulous, but also many of the scholarly tomes that we read while researching an article, dissertation, book, etc. And, from that point of view, the Kindle and other e-readers also need to allow users to know what page number they are on. I have Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble on my Kindle, but while I can make notes, highlights, etc. in my electronic copy, I can’t cite it because I have no page numbers. To me, this is the biggest reason why the Kindle remains a primarily pleasure reading device, rather than an academic one.
Nels P. Highberg - January 21, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Kristin, I certainly understand. Over WinterTerm, class discussions were more difficult than usual because a few students were using the Kindle. We’d have eighty pages to read and discuss of a memoir that does not have chapters, and they would read a quotation and not be able to tell anyone where it was, so the rest of us had to flip through and try to find it. And citing it in their papers was tricky. I started feeling odd marking some students down for errors in citation when the Kindle students were not even able to attempt to cite and therefore could not even make the errors.
George H. Williams - February 2, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Yes, for profit publishers will be reluctant to do the sorts of things I mention in the post above, but this reluctance doesn’t explain why the millions of words of free content–created by experts and published online in open access archives–aren’t being adapted for use as digital textbooks.
Kate - February 2, 2010 at 11:53 am
I’m a comp-sci student and I can tell you why: Pirating. Companies are so afraid to lose a copy or 2 to it that they miss out on many sales. The majority of ebook textbooks are from whatever name ichapters.com has renamed itself and have terrible DRMs which make people hate it and WANT to pirate it so it will no longer treat them as criminals. It is not a pdf, as the site says, but is a .spdf, which needs oracle, IE, adobe reader that is not too old or NEW, and to check back often to see if it is still yours. And you’re renting it. The only way to get around it is to have an extra linux machine and trick it into thinking it is a physical printer. It’s not worth the hassle, so I can’t imagine anyone buying them more than once, leaving an impression that ebook textbooks are not something people want to buy, leading other companies to think it is a total waste of time and money.