Good News for Textbook Publishers
March 4, 2015
I read “Students Reject Digital textbooks.” Textbook publishers have embraced slicing and dicing with alacrity. The idea is that a new textbook or collection of readings can be assembled with little input from a human editor. The future of automatically output texts seemed to be zeros and ones.
According to the write up some students are not too thrilled with digital textbooks. I know that find the iPad and Kindle a lousy way to read textbooks with illustrations, charts, and graphs. The iPad, for example, does not allow me to scale up an illustration in the reference book for Sony Vegas Professional. As a result, the illustrations are useless. A printed book delivers an image I can view. Score one for print in my experience.
The article reports:
As Good E Reader reports, a new survey by Student Monitor found that 87% of the students they spoke to preferred to buy or borrow textbooks as physical books. And a study from the University of Washington recently showed that one in four students who were given free digital textbooks still went out and bought a hard copy version, because they think it’s easier to take in information when they read it on paper as opposed to on a screen. And they’re probably right: last summer, a study found that readers absorb more information from paper books than from Kindles, and of course, if you’re up late studying, it’ll be easier to get to sleep afterward if you haven’t been staring at a backlit screen. I just hope that all these tech-eschewing students have got backpacks with strong shoulder straps.
Will textbooks become available in paper? Publishers want to make money, so paper may be the Bugatti Veryrons of education. Digital, despite its warts, may prove to be the easier path to textbook revenue. How does one search a textbook in paper? Not very easily, but the same statement applies to many digital volumes I am licensed to use. And learning? Publishing is usually about money I assert.
Stephen E Arnold, March 4, 2015
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