6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks - Chronicle.com

6 Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks - Chronicle.com

This is a very interesting article by an administrator at a university that committed to using e-textbooks. The found out several interesting things that would not be surprising to someone deeply involved in e-publishing but could be surprising to most educators:

1. The reader really matters. E-readers can be much harder to use than conventional textbooks, except for reading straight text. Since textbooks usually include many charts, graphs and illustrations, this is a big issue. So is note-taking an annotating. It's easy to scribble notes in the margins of a printed book, but e-readers make this more difficult. The university did not try DAISY books, so this was a big issue for them.

2. Learning curves can be steep. If you work in IT, you can expect that, but if you don't then you probably think that you and your students will just pick up your e-book reader and figure it out as you go. Lots of luck.

3. Professors are as eager or even more eager than the students. This shouldn't surprise anyone.

4. Battery life issues. After essentially giving up on the Sony Reader, the university switched to a format that worked on laptops, but then the students began running out of juice. Practically speaking, battery life is always an issue (and anyone who travels on business should know this), buy buying and carrying a spare battery would be a new experience for most students.

5. Graphical matter affects some subjects more than others. Per number one above, it is much easier to read a literature e-book than a chemistry one because of the relative lack of illustrations.

6. Environmental impact. Obviously, e-books are easier on the environment. So this is a big plus.

Read the entire article for more details.