E-textbooks never work
According to research carried out by Pearson in 2015, 88% of college students in the US own a laptop. Thanks to the price reduction of computers, it goes without saying that the number of college students worldwide who own laptops has increased staggeringly over the years.
It’s common for college students to use laptops for learning. We use them for working on our assignments, doing research on the Internet, writing papers, composing and reading emails and many more things. The laptop is our daily workhorse. We really, really rely on them.
However, no matter how powerful the laptop is, it can never truly replace our textbooks. Virtual textbooks are useless for it’s hard to take notes (if an additional e-notepad is not an option). I’ve seen people doing so: first they draw a blank text box right beside the relevant text, not too big or too small, and they will have to select the font, size and colour, and then they start to type. If they want to take another note somewhere else, they have to start over. This is just a nightmare. On a printed copy, all you need to do is write on it directly with a pen for God’s sake! And several studies show that among college students, those who study through e-texts may have more tendency to forget what they’ve learned after the final exam.
But still, some may argue that virtual textbooks are (possibly) cheaper and you may put as many books as you want into your device. The whole idea of an “e-schoolbag” is that you don’t need to carry bulks and heavy textbooks anymore. All you need is a single device. So does it really work?
In January 2012, Apple revealed an ambitious plan to change the educational system fundamentally with the use of virtual textbooks. First starting the scheme in US high schools, Apple partnered with the largest publishers that have published over 90% of textbooks in the US, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill, DK and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. These companies licensed Apple to sell their e-textbooks on the iBooks Store, with each book priced at 14.99 US dollars or lower. Apple made a deal with the US government to experiment with the idea of e-schoolbags at selected high schools in California. Students enrolled in the experimental programme would receive iPads for specific courses, where they could access the interactive functions of virtual textbooks.
Apart from the e-textbook scheme, Apple even created a magical “iBooks Author” e-book editing application for people who like to create and publish their own e-books, and of course for teachers who want to produce virtual textbooks. The whole scheme happened to work for a while, but after 4 years Apple stopped sharing their annual results. Rumour has it that they are shutting the programme in two years. This was Apple’s plan to kill paper texts, but it did not happen.
So why didn’t the idea of virtual textbooks take over schools worldwide?
Let me give you a fun fact. Teachers often email students some additional handouts to accompany our textbooks. The handout files may be handy enough for teachers, and ideally for students, but most students will still print them out as hard copies so as to take notes or even clip them to the related texts. Also, as a literature student, I’m totally aware that you cannot read a whole novel on a laptop in one sitting — for all the pain you’ll get after staring at a screen for hours. In fact, it does not matter what you’re reading on a laptop, you will get tired more easily reading e-materials than with printed copies.
Also, we should be aware that e-textbooks are in fact quite pricey, no matter how much they cost. You may purchase secondhand textbooks from secondhand bookshops, while you cannot buy secondhand e-textbooks anywhere. For most e-textbooks, the licences are sold and limited to the buyer and are not transferrable (a limiting mechanism is enforced through “digital media management”, or DRM). Some students will resell their old textbooks to people about to take the same course at a lower price so as to earn some extra cash. But you cannot do that with e-textbooks.
A problem of owning textbooks is that we won’t read them unless we need to do it. They can be useless after the course is done. No one will wake up at 3am and think, “Hmm, I need to check out that Introduction to Quantum Physics textbook”. Investment in e-textbooks will ultimately be a waste of money, as compared to printed versions.
Most importantly, other researches show that students do prefer printed texts for they shall concentrate and retain information better.
Before we conclude, let me give you another example explaining why the idea of the e-textbook and the e-schoolbag will never work. In August 2012, HTC, a Taiwan-based tech company, donated over 6000 HTC Flyer tablet computers to the 6 most prestigious high schools here in Taiwan. Mrs Cher Wang, the head of HTC, believed that it would encourage learning and hopefully change the way students learn. And the results? Well, most students with the devices simply spent hours coming up with a way to hack into the system for the most entertaining functions are locked. And once they did, they never paid attention to classes anymore, but instead to the 7-inch screen in the palm of their hands.
The idea of e-textbooks sounds great and extremely promising, yet it is, however, quite a huge misfire. They will not replace printed textbooks, at least for now.
