CES is over...now can we please get some e-textbooks?
Summary: E-textbooks have been slow to catch on, partly because textbook publishers have a multi-billion dollar industry to protect and partly because devices suitable for accessing them either lacked functionality or weren't ubiquitous enough to be of benefit to students. However, if CES, a show by its very name focused on the consumer space rather than education or business, has shown us anything, it's that there are more than enough interesting devices available to let e-textbooks take off.
E-textbooks have been slow to catch on, partly because textbook publishers have a multi-billion dollar industry to protect and partly because devices suitable for accessing them either lacked functionality or weren't ubiquitous enough to be of benefit to students. However, if CES, a show by its very name focused on the consumer space rather than education or business, has shown us anything, it's that there are more than enough interesting devices available to let e-textbooks take off.
While it's true that first-generation e-readers and their e-ink displays made for easy reading of text-heavy books, the latest generation of devices and software seem happy to sacrifice that particular advantage for drastically increased functionality. As PCWorld notes,
Are these devices truly e-readers? The whole point of electronic paper-based e-readers is that the display, which doesn't use a backlight, mimics the look of physical paper and is easier on the eyes than a bright, backlit LCD. I saw many LCD "e-readers" at the show, but none had those same qualities.
I don't care if they're not e-readers. I want a cheaper, smarter, better way to get pounds of books into a single device that can meet a variety of educational needs. I want software like Blio displaying interactive textbooks that link to additional web resources, videos, and other useful online tools. No e-ink? I don't think too many students (or administrators) will mind if they can cut textbook costs, access their books easily, and simply have their books live up to the 21st Century expectation of interactivity.
But here's the problem. CES gave us software, tablets, better netbooks, cheaper notebooks, "slates", and plenty of other ways to view and interact with a new generation of books. Right now, though, the books just aren't there. I didn't hear any announcements from Pearson or other major publishers about their new partnerships with Kurzweil and Microsoft to deliver great content with smart DRM on a Windows 7 slate. I didn't hear about the MSI/Houghton-Mifflin booth announcing a vast library of textbooks that had been ported to their new dual-screen color LCD e-book.
I'm sincerely hoping that the expression "Build it and they will come" applies here. Because the devices have been built. But if all I want to do is read the next installment of Twilight, I have a Kindle and a Sony Reader for that. If I want to be able to check off "EPUB" when our district is ordering new textbooks, I'm going to need some buy-in very soon from the publishers.
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Talkback
e-textbook reader
Hurry it up, please.
I was wrong 10 years ago
I pointed out this device should be very durable, weatherproof, and be two-way wireless controlled by the school's servers. The school would lease its eTextBooks, and the wireless connection would eliminate those glued in errata pages. The teachers could administer multiple choice quizzes & tests in real-time or 'take home' form as desired, with electronic grading and student progress profiling for the teacher.
This SHOULD have been ubiquitous 5 years ago, but as we can see, I was sadly, very sadly, wrong.
Blio why? PDF already does it.
Adobe PDF already does interactive multi-media (Flash is built-in). PDF already has DRM.
Or better yet, just publish eTextbooks in HTML/CSS/Javascript. Then you can read them with any browser, and they would support interactivity and multimedia.
Forget about textbook publishers, support opensource
Basically, you can read the books for free online, but there were also other ways to get the book in other formats where you would have to pay. The company seemed to be gaining traction lately, with a nice round of funding, and now it's being reported that 40,000 students at over 400 colleges and universities will be using Flat World texts this fall. That sound you hear? It's an old stodgy market getting disrupted.
Related to this, Slashdot points out that here in California, where the state was running a free digital textbook competition, the results showed that some of the open solutions won the competition and were considered better reference materials than the ones provided by big publishers. In fact, the e-texts from a small company called CK-12 seemed to do quite well -- 3 of the 4 online texts that were deemed to meet 100% of the state's standards all came from CK-12.
Examples:
http://linear.ups.edu/opentexts.html
RE: CES is over...now can we please get some e-textbooks?
support eco-system that will reliably support students and
districts 'leasing' topics or chapters, not whole books!
the publishers are in no hurry to leave the horse drawn era
and enter the 'horse-less carriage' age.
recall whenever there is a paradigm shift there are winners
and losers...bug publishers are lining up as losing oerall in
all this.
it's a bit like expecting petrol companies coming up with
an energy replacement system.
the hydrogen economy is 'ready to go' but requires much
higher fuel pricing.
similar with textbooks....can get writers, editors in US(and
here in Australia) with typsetting in India, then printing in
China, and shipping back for a fraction of the cost of
printing locally....so why cut out an entire segment of the
book preparation workflow??
the opportunity for writers to publish direct is the sleeper
here...the major writing, state endoresed curriculum
projects are just to ponderous and inflexible for what
teachers are after.
...however, if the assessment never changes (point in time
paper examination) there is no imperative to alter the
content delivery...in this we have been confusing education
and schooling for years...education needs e-book delivery
(and the whole textbook idea to be re-visited)..schooling
to gain credentials and get a high entrance score does
not...this is a gatekeeper strategy and does not require
more students, just 'better' students (who can answer
exam questions)
the schooling industry meets education industry has never
been more obvious!
RE: CES is over...now can we please get some e-textbooks?
The high cost and effort in us lesser mortals publishing a book/short
story/article may be circumvented if we have a similar medium for selling
'the
written word'.
Hopefully a 'white knight' will come forth and move the power back to
the
people.
Same mistakes, different column
Chris, once again, you make no distinction (as you ALWAYS FAIL to do) between solutions for K-12 and Higher Ed. K-12 can work with ebooks that have ONEROUS DRM, maybe. And certainly lightning the backpack weight of primary and secondary students is a good thing. Finally, a school district can afford to buy a multiyear license for a book to be reused each year by different students. Then again, what do you do with poor school districts who cannot keep up their infrastructure, much less afford a few thousand e-readers. Even platform independent e-books would still need the e-part, and there is still a digital divide in the United States, especially in rural areas and some inner cities.
Higher ed is a whole different ballgame. Want to keep your book? Not with the DRM that is in place nowadays. You can keep it with yet another fee and you end up paying more than if you bought a used book. COSTP is a fine solution for K-12, maybe; but again, not for higher ed.
Some advocate eliminating publishers, allowing writers to direcly market their wares. Fine for non-academic books (even then, I avoid "self-published" work like the plague, as it is always BAD), but people who advocate this have either never written a book or fancy themselves a writer and boor their poor acquaintences with their "knowledge" and foist upon them their latest "gem." Editors and publishers provide a much needed filter and corrective to a bunch of cranks scratching out their own ridiculous views of whatever.
In the end, let me ask three questions. First, what media will ebooks be kept on? Paper has been around for thousands of years, flash drives for about twenty (not even counting floppies in three sizes, zip drives, cds, dvds, and tape). Second, traditional books have been around for a long time because they are "hardware" independent and portable. Finally, and no-one has ever had an answer for this, drop a traditional textbook from 20 feet in the air. Then drop a brick on it. Now do the same with your Kindle. Especially since Chris advocates giving out Kindles to grade and high schoolers, tell me, which medium is now readable? There is a reason that I have books from 40 years ago but cannot access some files I have stored on a 5 1/4" floppy.