A University That Reveres Tradition Experiments With E-Books

By JEFFREY R. YOUNG

Textbook pages never rustle during a University of Virginia seminar about the Salem witch trials, because printed books have been replaced by electronic ones.

ALSO SEE: Are We Headed Toward the Bookless Campus?

Students in the experimental course were lent hand-held computers loaded with several assigned textbooks, as well as electronic versions of every warrant, indictment, and deposition from the trials.

The course was designed to take advantage of two of the most celebrated features of digital textbooks -- their capacity to hold reams of data and their ability to let readers easily search for any word or phrase. In the classroom, students became on-the-spot historians, using the gadgets to home in on court documents so they could argue for and against various interpretations of what happened in Salem, Mass., more than 300 years ago.

Many futurists have predicted the death of the book, but the printed word has proven extremely difficult to replicate electronically in a form that is as elegant and easy to read as text on paper. A pilot project here this spring, comprising two courses, attempted to see whether the latest e-book technologies could allow entire courses to go bookless.

During class sessions, students tapping on tiny screens with plastic styluses looked more as if they were taking scientific readings than discussing history and religion. The setting was decidedly old-fashioned, though; the class met in one of the few classrooms remaining from Jefferson's "academical village."

"Whenever we got to talking about something in a document, we would just go to the document," says Amy Nichols, a senior who took the course. The students say they used court records and other texts more than they would have with bulky printed versions of the same documents.

What's more, the students were bolder than usual in criticizing scholarly summaries of events presented in their textbooks, says Benjamin C. Ray, the religious-studies professor teaching the course. In fact, they were often too quick to dispute scholarly accounts once they came upon source material that seemed to contradict the textbook, he says. "I think they're going overboard. They're trashing too much ... without knowing the historical methods."

For their part, the students quickly discovered disadvantages of the high-tech texts. Unlike paper books, e-books sometimes crash. Several students lost marginal notes and bookmarks when their hand-held computers suddenly erased their data.

Some students said reading from the tiny screens made the texts seem more fragmented. "When I'm at home sitting on my chair curled up with the afghan on my lap, I don't want to be flipping through this," says Kristen Buckstad, a student in the course, holding up her Hewlett-Packard Journada, which sells for about $450. The hand-held device is roughly the size of a Palm Pilot, with a 2½-by-3¼-inch color screen and enough memory to store about 90 books. "The screen is too small," she says. "It's hard to get the overall feeling of the flow of the narrative."

Students can also read their assignments on laptops or desktop computers. The electronic texts are available on the World Wide Web through Virginia's Electronic Text Center, which since 1992 has worked with the university's libraries to create digital copies of scholarly and literary books.

Titles in that archive include classic texts that are no longer covered by copyright, as well as texts for which the university has bought the distribution rights. Its virtual shelves feature a mix of the often-studied and the obscure, in languages that include Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Latin, and Apache (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu).

The e-text center selected two courses for its pilot project: the one on the Salem witch trials, which is a senior-level undergraduate course, and a graduate-level English course about depictions of space in 18th- and 19th-century literature.

The e-books for both courses were formatted with new Microsoft text-display software called Reader. Microsoft provided most of the loaner hand-held computers -- and did its best to turn the two courses into product focus groups. A representative from Microsoft sat in on one session of each course and later interviewed many of the students. Those who agreed to be interviewed got copies of Microsoft Office 2000 for their trouble, though many felt that the company was being stingy in not letting them keep the Journadas as well.

The promise of the Reader software is to provide an interface that faithfully simulates the pages of a book, in typefaces that are clearer and easier to read than typical computer fonts. The e-text center has converted 1,600 e-books in its online library to the Microsoft format since last summer. It also has created versions of the same books using text-display software developed by Palm for use on its hand-held computers. Standard hypertext versions of the texts remain available as well.

David Seaman, director of the center, says the new formats are far better to curl up with for extended reading than traditional Web formats. "Nobody reads books on the Web. You think of the Web as a searching-and-browsing technology. It's not a reading technology."

People all over the world have downloaded more than two and a half million copies of e-books in the new formats from the Virginia center's Web site since the texts were made available in August, says Mr. Seaman. One reason for the popularity of the new formats, he suggests, is that users can quickly download an entire book and then read it later, offline, which is not easy with standard hypertext versions.

"We were surprised at how quickly second- and third-world users were hitting on our e-books," he says, noting that some foreign libraries might be supplementing their collections. "They have no book budget, but they have a modem."

The less successful of Virginia's two classroom tests of the e-book format was the graduate English course. The 18 students were lent hand-held computers with electronic copies of all of the assigned books, but unlike the Salem class, they rarely used the devices in the classroom, says Cynthia Wall, the course instructor. Most of the students bought printed versions of the books on the course reading list, even though their electronic copies were free.

During a recent class session, the hand-held devices in use by most of the students were books themselves, dog-eared and annotated. When Ms. Wall, a professor of English, referred to a given passage, the sound of rustling pages filled the room.

"I love the physicality of books," says Kristen Jensen, a doctoral student who is specializing in 18th-century literature -- and who bought printed books for the course. Like many of her colleagues, she wants to keep the books, along with her notes, after the course, and she knew she would not be allowed to keep the hand-held computer.

She found it disconcerting to see other students playing with their hand-held computers during class. "It feels rude," she says. "You notice when someone is poking around in their e-books." She couldn't help asking herself, "Are they playing solitaire?"

Ms. Jensen did find the e-books useful outside of class, however. She used her Journada mainly for research, calling up electronic versions of rare documents that she otherwise would have to read on microfilm or in the library's rare-book room. "Microfilm is wretched," she says, explaining that she has spent plenty of time during her academic career fumbling with plastic spools and microfilm readers. "And it is not very portable."

Students in both courses engage in many types of reading during a typical week on the campus. Sometimes they are just looking through an assigned book for a good quote to support an argument. In that case, e-books do the job nicely, many say.

But at other times, students want to immerse themselves in a text -- and for that, they say, paper is superior.

One of the graduate students, Alex Gil, says it is only a matter of time before e-books become a standard feature of any course. He was the most enthusiastic e-book user in the class, often reading from it during sessions.

To Ms. Wall, however, the experiment proved to her that a bookless campus will never be. "This cannot take the place of books," she says, pointing at her hand-held computer. "I think they can coexist."

Her biggest complaint is that lines of poetry in the electronic versions are often broken because the screen is not wide enough. "Poetry uses space, and to see what a poem means you have to see how it looks," she says. "If you have heroic couplets where one line is broken in half consistently, then you don't have the structure that [the poet] so carefully designed."

When students in the witch-trials course were asked whether they believed that all of their books might one day be replaced with e-books, several quickly protested. "That's awful," said one.

Even Mr. Ray, the course's professor and a proponent of the technology, says it will most likely supplement, rather than replace, printed books at the university. "We're high on technology, but there's this cherishing of the book," he says, as he sits at the head of the seminar table. "Look where we are. This is old stuff that works."

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