In the few years since I graduated from college, it would seem that having a laptop (or the equivalent) has gone from being a handy tool to the prime prerequisite to college life. Not too surprisingly, there is a comparable movement of students toward dealing with electronic versions of textbooks (albeit several years after this movement towards complete laptop dominance in college scholastic work). First off, I always wondered who was making all of the huge profits from the school book business (it has a similar business model to that of a drug cartel…).
Barnes & Noble have a PC/Mac application (Nook study) which allows college students to buy and download class textbooks. This application has the added ability of bookmarking, highlighting passages, and formatting citations for written papers and reports…all free…once you pay for the textbooks… I can presume that these e-textbooks are less expensive than the printed versions (they would have to be!), and as an added bonus to the book publishers, it also effectively kills the used book market.
I have a new app on my iPad (inkling) which looks quite similar in use to the Nook Study app on my NetBook. Both of these applications are platforms for e-textbooks, and offer the similar abilities to bookmark, write marginalia, to share and confer (as social networking) with other students, and to easily render citations (in correct formats) to a paper for almost any class. I am impressed with this idea…but for the fact that e-textbook publishers are not catching up as quickly as they should be.
It was only 2 ½ years ago where I was in a situation (my last semester on campus at college) where having tools like this would have made my life a lot easier. I forgot to mention that the Nook (NetBook app) also allows for adding PDF files (from published peer review articles) into the program. I could have created my senior term papers quite a bit more easily in that I would have been able to focus solely on my ideas instead of the mechanics of adding in citations and creating a bibliography in the correct format.
Taking these new implementations of e-book technologies, I wonder how this will affect college book stores… For instance, Barnes & Noble are advertising that you can get all of your e-textbooks from them (online) for up to 90% of list price (whatever that is…).
Over the last several years, the idea of buying used textbooks on the internet has saved untold amounts of money for impoverished college students, now with the presumption that e-textbooks take off, I wonder how long it will take for some enterprising students to create what would effectively be an e-textbook black market…
This while idea of e-textbooks creates (for me) a number of related questions, such as: how will this idea trickle down into high schools? What will the real advantages and disadvantages be, when compared to traditional paper? For the average student, will this paradigm change be easy or difficult to manage?
And as I start to think further down the road, I wonder what this means with regard to the idea of a textbook… Since these new implementations of textbooks will reside (virtually) right next to the rest of the internet, and all the rest of the media which a student might have access to (on a typical laptop), I wonder if this will slowly dilute the whole idea of a ‘text’ which is the focus of one’s learning…
