As a parent the weight of kids books bags is often IMO near absurd these days with the numerous large books that children have to schlep between house and school. I also can’t count he number of times I’ve had to bring my kids back to school because they forgot a book they needed for a test they next day.
Anyway, I was working with some property brochures the other day and was struck by how beautifully the print to adobe PDF function/applet worked. Entire pages can be effortlessly rendered to a compact pdf document about 200K-400K each just by printing out of an application.
If this technology is available why not require (from the perspective of a school system buying books) every textbook publisher who wins a contract with a school system to give a multi-year (say 5 year) license to a school who buys their textbooks. The publisher would be required to maintain a server (or allow the school to) that would host the textbook in pdf document format.
Cost would be relatively minimal compared to the manufacturing cost of the textbook. All that would be required is that the textbook be converted to pdf pages which would be (as I described above) trivially easy and relatively compact. the kids would be given a web address for the book where they could get pages as needed.
The license would only need to be as long as the textbook would be expected to physically last.
The decreased weight would save kids, back, save gas and prevent the “I forgot my book” scenario.
The textbook publisher has a small additional cost, and concerns about intellectual property theft are a non-issue as most textbooks need to be replaced or re-done within a few years just as a matter of course and the license for the digitized version would go with the sale of the dead tree version.
So to recap, the cost is relatively small, the benefits (IMO) substantial. What’s the downside?
It’s an interesting idea, but the most immediate downside is that not all students have access to a computer with a decent printer and high-speed internet – not at school and certainly not at home.
And the schools can’t afford to print out the equivalent of an entire textbook every year for every student. Ridiculous, you say? My wife works in a relatively affluent suburban district and they still use dittos for handouts, worksheets and so on because photocopies cost more.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. The digitized books would not be instead of the paper version, *but in addition to. * The kids would still have the dead tree version for classroom use or home use if they desired. The net copy is supplemental.
There will always be kids without net access, but I would think the large majority of kids these days do have net access. Given the small incremental cost of providing it, and the benefits should the inability of a small non-connected minority prevent the majority from having access?
Not to mention that few would be able to read the texts on the bus, etc.
But, actually, many texts are including websites that go along with their books. So, when your kid forgets his or her textbook, or when a class set is somehow diminished, as long as there are a few computers in the class room, conceivably there could be a CD-ROM version of the text to address such problems.
But actually, many schools address this issue simply by doubling their orders of text books. The kid gets one to keep at home, and the teacher has a set in the classroom. Believe me, this problem has long been on the minds of educators, parents and students.
My nephew is home schooled in a small town in a rural county. Because he started kindergarten in homeschool, he got given a computer (not sure if it is a laptop or not).
I am an avid reader and have over 1k books. I read mostly in bed. The bedside lamp bothers my husband and most book lights are too bright for him too. I wanted to buy an ebook reader. I am their target demographic, I have the money, I’m an avid reader and would appreciate the portability of the reader. The readers were about $200 at the time. I never broke down and bought one. Do you know why?
Because I like having hardcovers of books and I like to own them. So say the best seller is $34.95 in book form. I buy the book, but it doesn’t come with a disk or whatever in the back of it, so if I want to have the digital format, I have to pay an ADDITIONAL $34.95. I can’t loan the digital format, I can’t check out the digital format at the library.
IMHO, books are never going to be any different until someone steps forward and says they have a better plan that actually addresses the primary needs of readers Such as:
Longevity-paper books can last virtually forever.
Portability-paper books can be taken anywhere, vacation, bus, bed, airplane, jury duty.
Openness-Books have been loaned for who knows how many years. Probably since the first dude finished one and said “Man, someone needs to read this too!”
Availability-Books are easily had, there are clubs oranized to distribut them freely (Libraries, Bookcrossings, etc)
There are problems with digital format of course, not only file protection, but buyer protection. In a school setting, with essentially leasing the digital files to the students with a self-destruct date would be pretty effective. I don’t think it would be that hard to protect.
I hope that by the time my 1 year old understands the importance of books, will have ready access to information. I would assume computers will become much more flexible as she progresses through school.
I assure you, the concern of bookload is not weighing on the school board. I’ve seen kids tugging bookbags that had to outweigh them. Kids backpacks now come with wheels on them. I don’t recall every carring home more than 4-5 books in high school, and that is probably a stretch.
Oh, and .pdf files drive me batty. So many things are unnecessarily put into .pdf that absolutely don’t need to be. My computer crashes everytime I try to use Acrobat Reader. Not to mention I’m certain all their ebooks would be using the Comic Sans font, and thus spread its use.
:dubious: Those must be some pretty wealthy school districts. The “two books per kid” idea has been floated around here every year, with the idea of keeping one at home and one at school, but it’s way too expensive.
I don’t see any of these being a problem with digital books.
Files can last even longer than books, because you can make a perfect backup. Suppose a CD-ROM has a shelf life of 50 years… after 49 years, you can make a copy, and that one will last another 50 years. A book might last a long time if you take good care of it, but it will eventually decay no matter what.
A PDF can be taken anywhere you can take a laptop or e-book reader, and those readers are getting pretty compact.
Files have been “loaned” since they first existed. See Napster for a well-known, recent example.
Files are even easier to distribute than books - the shipping cost is zero if you have a connection to the internet, and you can pack dozens onto a CD.
An online message board is obviously not going to be a representative sample, but I think people overestimate the prevailance of computer access. As recently as 2003, a national survey found that 45% of the households in this country do not have online access. Admittedly that percentage is shrinking and some of those households may have computers without internet access, but I think it’s safe to say that at least one out of three children in this country wouldn’t be able to use computer textbooks at home.
There’s no reason not to do this. It’s relatively cheap and has high potential benefits. Even if some kinds can’t access it yet, the fact that 1 in 6, or 1 in 8 kids can’t use the supplemental access option should not be a reason to hold off.
You know, why not go back to lockers? As for homework, there’s too damn much. Each teacher should get one day a wekk to assign homework. Thus, each kid has at most two books to take home (one for homework, and one for test study).
Another idea is to print the books in pamphlet form, chapter by chapter. Use cheap paper, cut down on photos.
Go back to lockers? There are schools where kids don’t get lockers anymore?
Back when I was in school, a lot of the teachers would make copies of certain pages, and use them to make packets to hand out to class to cut down on book load, which is similar to the packet suggestion. I guess that was illegal though.
If a child didn’t have a computer at home, the school could allow them to print off pages in the computer room (assuming that it has one).
And even if a household does have access, unless each kid his their own personal computer, the family computer may not always be available whenever the kid needs to read an assignment.
Still, I think it’s a good idea, even if it’s not The Answer To The Problem.
Another good idea might be not to make the textbooks so honkin’ big and heavy, perhaps by splitting them into multiple volumes.
Or, give students P.E. credit for carrying around loads of heavy books with them.
Over here, the law says that homework shouldn’t exceed one hour in lenght (and children know it - when the 4th period teacher wants to give a long homework, everybody protested that the previous teachers had already given us so much work!) on normal schooldays (longer for the weekend, or not consecutive days - Mo. to Thursday - or over the holidays), and that is with school only lasting to 1 pm, anyway.
We also have much slimer books - I don’t know why the textbooks are so thick and heavy in America? (Considering that some of the books that have been approved have gregarious errors, or have been written very sloppily, I’d suggest picking out better, but thinner books next time.
And lockers are a good idea (we don’t have them, but we always grumbled about carrying the heavy atlas for geography).
Two books per child? Wow. A lot of the parents here (I don’t have kids, but have friends who do) are complaining because not every child gets a book - they have to share them.
Fluff. My only remotely recent experiences have been with textbooks for intro & principles courses for economics, and the one’s I’ve seen are very, very fluffy. From the perspective of presenting information visually, they’re complete train wrecks that only look good when compared to PowerPoint.
I also suspect part of the problem is the lack of a canon for most subjects. Here, kids don’t take A-levels and O-levels, so the textbook writers probably have less focus. Indeed, it seems that a lot of textbooks are intended to cover myriad sub-subjects, from which the teacher can choose as she pleases.
That said, I don’t have much sympathy for the problems stated in the OP, even though electronic copies of the books make perfect sense, really. The one downside would be that smaller printing runs may actually drive up the costs for each book, making those on the wrong side of the digital divide pay even more outrageous prices for their books. Of course, the OP isn’t suggesting smaller printing runs, so that’s moot.
I do find reading from a computer screen to be quite difficult, and I almost always have to print out hard copies. Books are much easier to flip through and reference; though electronic documents are much easier to search. Probably the best solution would be a cheap $100 laptop that could be universally distributed. Electronic copies of texts would then be provided, but without the cost of producing, printing, and shipping the books. Authors would still get their royalties, and hard copies could be available as an option. One cheap-ass laptop would do the job; they don’t have to be suped up for gaming, graphics, and all that other shit, but just to put on textbooks and maybe some java-type demonstrations. You don’t need a lot of power for that. With that, one machine could last a kid for several years, and even if it doesn’t, one machine still ain’t that expensive compared to a set of books.
I only just recently graduated from high school (class of 2003). And I wasn’t even in AP classes and I had too much homework. And by “too much homework,” I mean several hours of my nights were often taken up with extraneous assignments.
And here we had to BUY our lockers from the school. I don’t get it, honestly. It wasn’t like a deposit system, either - you forked over the money, you got your locker. End of story. They kept the money. The only plus side to that was that we had block scheduling, which meant we had six total classes, but only three 100 minute classes a day, so you only had to bring half of your stuff with you. The down side to that was that if you forgot to change out your backpack, you had all of your A day stuff on a B day, and you failed for the day (and there was me, who had a huge-ass van where I just kept all of my school stuff).
I don’t get why we expect so much of kids nowadays, and yet they’re so dumb - maybe it’s because we’re so busy shoving schoolwork at them that they don’t have a chance to learn about Real Life.
I meant to say something about the OP with that post and got sidetracked. Sorry.
I think the idea of an online supported version of textbooks is a great idea, for those students who have access to the 'net. And like everyone else, I think there should still be a print version for the students who can’t access the online version. And I can’t see why it would be such a hard thing for the printing companies, because a lot of the time (not all of the time) they have to convert the pages to PDF anyway for printing - it’s ready made!
This assumes that, in 50 years, they’re still using the same format and can read a 50-year-old bit of media (could you read from a 5 1/4" floppy right now?)