It all started with a simple test of 200 students who replaced a majority of their hard to carry college textbooks with the Sony E-Reader. The idea was to see how viable it would be for students to stop using print textbooks, and what the drawbacks to going fully electronic could be for the student body.
The first trial was a mixed success. The idea proved to be viable, but not quite with the Sony e-reader. Students found that the first generation E-Reader was ill-designed for studying, since it did not have a search function and they could not take notes easily on the pages. It made it hard to quickly flip through the book for what you needed.
Did this stop Northwest Missouri State University from continuing on with their e-book plan? Quite the contrary. Even though the second generation of e-book trials will be done on a laptop rather than an e-reader, Sony is making changes to their landmark device to make it more college friendly, and to fix the problems the students had with studying using the device.
Take 2.0
The pilot program, which used only the Sony e-reader preloaded with all the textbooks, was tested out with about 200 students in total. This spring they plan on expanding this program to include about 4,000 of the 6,500 students. They won’t supply e-readers anymore, but will give the student a package that pre-loads the textbooks onto their laptops.
This program is expected to save the campus over $400,000 a year, once they completely get rid of all physical textbooks. Most students spend over 1,000$ a year on text books, a price that is rising tuitions and making it more and more difficult for students to pay back their expensive loans after they graduate.
Textbook Free in Three
The college plans on using all e-books within the next three years, getting rid of any physical, printed book that they require students to use. One of the only things holding the program back right now is a decent e-reader and the fact that quite a few textbooks are not available in e-book format. They see that as changing very soon in the near future.
They plan on offering a much wider format for their e-books in the near future, including versions for smart phones, and a much wider format of e-readers, giving the students a wide selection of tools that they can use to learn. They see this as key to adopting the new technology and getting the students behind such an experimental program.
Drastically Moving Forward
Northwest Missouri State University may be on the leading edge for the e-book revolution, but it won’t take long for other college campuses to join in on the fun. With tuition costs rising drastically each year, every campus is looking towards ways of cutting back on spending without cutting into the quality of education. The more viable a project like e-textbooks can be, the more money a university can save in the long run.
It shouldn’t take too long for an e-reader to replace the laptop in college campuses. Laptops can be as big of a burden as textbooks are when being lugged from class to class. In addition, laptops consume much more power than e-readers. An average laptop can give only 2-4 hours of reading time with one charge, whereas an e-reader can provide 50+ hours of reading time. Eyestrain with an LCD display on a laptop is another issue as well. Most e-paper displays has a resolution of 170 dots per inch, which is twice as high as what we are used to from computer screens
The next generation of the Sony E-Reader, the PRS-707, seems to address all the problems brought up in the trial period very nicely. Including search functions and the ability to write notes on any page (as well as highlighting specific text for later). The Kindle already supports such functionality already, and might be another good choice for the next generation of college e-texbooks. Princeton, Yale, Oxford and UC Berkeley are already targeting the Kindle for the electronic versions of their textbooks.
Spreading Across the Globe
Northwest Missouri State University may be breaking new ground, but they are not the only ones pushing for an all digital lifestyle. Just recently Arthur Sulzberger, owner, chairman, and publisher of The New York Times, said in an interview that, “I really don’t know if we’ll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don’t care, either.”
With such venerable print institution as the New York Times easily envisioning a future without print it only goes to show that the nature of publishing itself is changing and doing so rather rapidly. In order to keep up with the advancement of the age of digital publishing, college campuses everywhere need to prepare for it now so that they are not scrambling at the last minute to understand the technology.
And the US Government needs to begin researching its own programs soon enough for the public school system (add that to the spending package Obama). Mandaluyong City in the Philippines just rolled out a pilot program testing a Philippine developed e-reader for public school use, and so far the experiment seems to be a huge success. The French and Chinese governments are also researching e-paper in the school system.
Other articles about Northwest Missouri University’s e-textbook program:
http://www.physorg.com/news151174757.html
http://callcenterinfo.tmcnet.com/news/2008/12/05/3836269.htm
http://www.teleread.org/2009/01/12/nmsu-e-textbook-program/
By Paul Jessup
e-reader, sony
Textbook publishers have no interest in cannibalizing their profit margins even if it improves the experience for students. It will take a major university like Harvard to mandate that its entire entering class have e-readers and then force publishers to offer electronic editions.
And about 95 percent of available textbooks from McGraw-Hill are offered as e-books in almost every academic subject.
“We anticipate that e-books and print books will occupy the higher education market together for a number of years,” said Tom Stanton, director of communications for McGraw-Hill Education.
From:
http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/11/e-books-have-a.html#previouspost
Whoops, some of my original text might’ve gotten cut off. My point was, a lot of big name text book makers are *embracing* ebooks, and not seeing them as cannibalizing their profits.