Publishers Promote E-Textbooks, but Many Students and Professors Are Skeptical

By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK

Moving tentatively -- but definitely on the move -- textbook publishers are experimenting with e-books, making students and professors their sometimes reluctant guinea pigs.

By fall, traditional publishers

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will be offering hundreds of their textbooks in digital formats, up from a few dozen this past year. The big-five publishers -- Harcourt, Houghton Mifflin, McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Thomson -- together plan to sell more than 850 titles. And some institutions -- notably the University of Phoenix, which hopes to become "bookless" -- see e-books as a way to customize and improve instruction.

The publishers are eager to see e-textbooks catch on, but at the same time worry that students and professors won't buy the new offerings.

As a result, few publishers have put much money into jazzing up the material. Few of the e-textbooks now on the market have the kinds of snazzy, built-in multimedia elements -- like animated maps in history books that show how national boundaries have changed over time -- that would make e-textbooks a more compelling teaching tool.

Even for computer-savvy students, the inconvenience of using e-textbooks -- almost all of which are designed to be used on a personal computer -- is a bigger issue than some professors expected.

Clayton College and State University, a "laptop campus" outside of Atlanta that is proud of its students' facility with technology, presents one example. Donna McCarty, an associate professor of psychology, offered an e-textbook option in her classes in the hope that students would find the digital text interesting to manipulate, highlight, and annotate -- and that they would approach the material less passively than they do with print textbooks. A business professor offered the same option, hoping to save his students some money, because the e-textbook cost less than a printed book.

Both professors were surprised, to say the least, at the reaction. Students complained about having to scroll to find sections, about how long it took to scroll, and about the problems of reading from a laptop.

"I bought the book," not the e-text, says Debbie Whiteman, a student in psychology. The mother of two children, ages 9 and 11, "I study at ball fields, I study at the skating rink," she says. "When my kids are whirling around, I study psychology."

Several students said that although they found the e-textbook's search function easier to use than the index of a printed volume, they were using the e-textbook much less than their traditional textbooks.

Kasha L. Sumpter, a student in Ms. McCarty's class, was one of the new format's few fans. Like many students at Clayton, she rolls a small carry-on behind her to transport her laptop, five textbooks, and class notebooks. She'd love it, she says, if all her other books were e-texts.

But even some of the students who relish the notion of using a new medium -- like Aneal Khimani, a self-described "big-time computer nerd" taking psychology -- were disappointed that the e-texts' features, including one to annotate electronically, weren't as intuitive as they could be. Both the psychology and the business books were converted by a company called WizeUp, which says it has plans to improve the annotation capacity, as well as other features, by next semester.

Some of the inconveniences could be alleviated if the textbooks could be read on special e-book reading tablets or personal digital assistants. But the small devices aren't yet capable of handling textbooks' emphasis on graphics and color.

Susan Driscoll, chief operating officer at Bedford, Freeman & Worth, publisher of the psychology book used in Ms. McCarty's classes, says the hardware that would make e-textbooks more desirable is probably about five years away. When students can find durable, portable, affordable devices, she says, "then it will take off in the college market in a big way."

A December 2000 report on e-books by Forrester Research predicts that by 2003, digital-textbook sales will grow to $1.3-billion and will account for about 14 percent of all textbook sales (including non-college texts).

One institution embracing the e-book idea is the University of Phoenix. Its "bookless college" experiment is being closely watched by the publishing industry. The for-profit Phoenix is the largest private university in the country, with 89,000 students, who buy as many as a half-million textbooks each year. But now Phoenix is in the process of phasing out traditional textbooks altogether.

In partnership with McGraw-Hill, John Wiley & Sons, and Thomson, the university will provide its students with course content in several electronic formats. Substantial readings, best suited to traditional formats, will be provided using Microsoft Reader, new reading-friendly software that can be used on PC's and in some portable devices. Material that lends itself to interactivity, like multimedia presentations, will be deployed on the Web.

Adam Honea, who oversees the transition for Phoenix, says officials chose Reader over other options because they like its readability features; they also think that Reader will work best with the laptop-like PC Notebook that Microsoft and Toshiba are developing.

Publishers are willing to repackage their content because Phoenix is a big customer, with a common book list for similar courses in its large system. The arrangement will let the publishers continue to make a profit on sales to Phoenix students, while seeing how e-textbooks might fit into the changing educational landscape.

The first test of the e-textbook system begins this month. By next spring, Mr. Honea says, Phoenix expects 60 to 80 percent of its classes to be bookless.

Another experiment likely to attract attention comes from a company called GoReader, which has built a tablet-like computer designed to be used for e-textbooks. The device is not yet available for sale, but the company has run pilot projects with prototypes at the University of Chicago and Wake Forest University.

The GoReader tablet will come with a hefty price tag -- $400 to $600. But the company is hoping that e-textbooks for the device will be 20 to 30 percent cheaper than printed editions, says Andrew Watts, a marketing analyst for GoReader.

The company also hopes to sign bulk deals with graduate schools -- especially law and business schools -- under which the schools would buy every student in an incoming class a device and would make e-books the standard text.

In yet another pilot project, Adobe Systems plans to offer its eBook Reader software -- along with Web servers to distribute content -- to at least six institutions this fall. The company wants to observe how professors and students use textbook material in Adobe format as well as any electronic material that they publish themselves. The participants are Miami-Dade Community College, Scottsdale Community College, the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Utah Health Sciences, a number of distance-education classes at the University of Maryland and various departments on campuses in the University of Wisconsin System.

The ubiquity of computers and the talk of electronic formats are also reviving interest in products that are less like digitized books and more akin to interactive CD-ROM's or Web sites, using multimedia tools to present the content developed by academic authors.

Some, like the products now being sold by a company called Thinkwell, incorporate video clips of the author presenting the material, while elements of each chapter unfold on the screen.

Professors who teach with these e-texts -- and help to create them -- say they offer a welcome alternative, both as teaching tools and as publishing outlets.

Joe Walwik, an instructor at Blue River Community College, in Missouri, says he's thrilled with the Western Civilization II "text" he's using from a company called Digital Learning Interactive. Available in CD-ROM and on the Web, it includes overviews, primary readings and documents, and interactive maps that allow students to see, for example, the path of Napoleon's Russian campaign.

Having the primary materials, Mr. Walwik says, frees him up to spend time in class leading debates on the ideas of Locke and Rousseau rather than explaining to his students who they were and what they said. "This allows me to raise my expectations of my students," he says.

The product, which costs students about $50 a semester -- a fraction of what they would otherwise pay for a textbook and a pile of additional books -- helps students on limited budgets, particularly those at community colleges, he says. "They're paying $159 a course. They don't want to pay $200 for books."

For Martin Starr, a professor of business at Rollins College, the coming of these new-style textbooks also means a new, more supportive business model for authors, like him, whose books don't sell in huge numbers. The e-text format gives authors greater ability to revise their books more frequently.

Working with a company called OpenMind Publishing Group, Mr. Starr has developed a textbook on operations management that sells for $29 in CD-ROM format. The company also encourages other professors to develop content in particular areas, which it then offers either as a complete text or in modules that they can use to create customized e-textbooks for their courses. OpenMind says its products will cost 70 percent less than traditional textbooks.

Right now, some e-textbooks are being sold at artificially low prices to help generate sales, a variation of the kind of pricing incentives sometimes used by traditional publishers when they agree, for example, to package a study guide with a textbook at no additional cost. For example, WizeUp, the company that sold digitally converted textbooks to Clayton, in Georgia, offered extra discounts if professors required their entire class to use the electronic version of the textbook.

Ms. McCarty, the psychology professor, found such tactics unethical, and she urged the company to drop that model. After some of the students who had used the e-textbook last fall reported that it was still a bit buggy, she said she couldn't in good conscience make such a requirement. "I thought it was sleazy, and I told them so," she says. But the company, which says its e-textbooks are required in more than 60 college classes around the country, wouldn't relent on its pricing structure. So students paid $59 for the e-textbook or $75.65 for the printed book. Had she required it, the e-textbook would have cost $29. Lou Rodriguez, vice president of marketing, says the pricing is designed to reward the students of professors who are helping the company in ''taking the risk of innovation" by requiring the e-textbooks.

Eventually, e-textbooks will probably end up costing about the price of a used book, publishers say -- one-half to three-quarters of a traditional textbook's cover price.

Pricing issues aside, Ms. McCarty says she sees a future for e-textbooks, especially as the technology for using them improves. But she has reservations. "There is something kind of sensual about a book," she says wistfully. She recalls her own college days, bringing home her books from the college bookstore: "You sort of have this sense of starting an adventure."

It's a sensation she still treasures. One night a few weeks ago, Ms. McCarty was preparing for the next day's psychology class. She had brought her laptop home with her, with the e-textbook all loaded up and ready for scrolling and electronic highlighting. When it came time to review the assigned chapter, though, she grabbed the 700-page hardcover instead.

"I didn't want to boot it up," she says of the e-textbook. "I wanted to sit in bed with it. I wanted a book in my hands."

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