I guess the iconic book bag will soon be a footnote in history?
I still remember my high school textbooks. At least 25 lbs to lug back and forth from home to my school locker. College was worse. My 3 semester Calculus text weighed 8 lbs by itself!!!
Any predictions on when school textbooks go to a Kindle or similar device?
At least it will eliminate fines students pay. I got fined my senior year in HS for some minor scuff marks on my textbooks. Well, maybe not. If the school issues the kindles, then I guess the student is still responsible for damage.
You think electronic textbooks will work? Has it been tried yet?
How about cost? A typical semesters books in college costs at least $250 - $350. Will that come way down?
I voted 4 years. I think by then a few textbooks like English, History, Business will be on kindle type devices.
Science and math will take longer. Maybe 8 years from now?
It will probably start in college because students already buy their books. Heck, some classic literature may already be on kindle. Death of a Salesman, the Greek plays, etc.
High School & Middle School?? Money will be a big issue for public schools. That may be a stumbling block for awhile. They may need to develop a special, more rugged reader for them.
I doubt the costs will come down at all, because it rarely happens with other digital formats - Steam still has to sell games at retail prices (barring their frequent sales), and publishers made Amazon charge the same for their Kindle versions of books.
I think it will be at least ten years, just because the already small market for student textbooks would be even smaller for eBooks. Until the eReader becomes a common piece of technology for pre-college age students, it wouldn’t be viable, as it would be just another cost for freshmen on top of the books themselves.
There are loads of advantages to physical books for classes; making notes, for one thing, is a much more organic process (although touch screen eReaders are available).
Although I’m an anomaly as the only course books I had were a few synoptic texts and an annotated Beowulf - I used the library for everything else I needed to read.
For colleges computerized books are more costly. Besides they initial cost of the device you have to buy the updates so you can use the book for that year. In other words you can’t resell / give your used textbook away as it won’t work next term. Have to retake a class, sorry you have to buy the book over again.
My friend’s sons go to a private school and they have been doing this for quite some time. All of their homework is done on a laptop and is synched with a mainframe as they walk through the door. If they arrive late, their homework is late.
I work in Educational Publishing. As noted above, many US schools are already digital or have digital initiatives. My prediction isn’t on your poll: More and more schools will go digital starting already, but there will be holdouts (possibly a few whole states) that don’t start for a decade or more, and some that never go all the way.
Major issues: The textbook software may or may not be affordable, but figuring out how to keep kids from banging up, losing, hacking, or infecting devices is tricky. You also get digital rot – will the format a school buys today still be supported in five or ten years? And IT support is already a serious problem in many schools.
I think most people who don’t work in publishing or education don’t realize how fractured “American” education is. Every district is different.
I really can’t vote, it is one of those deals where it could be next year or 10 from now, the tech world can be surprising. The abrupt explosion of ebook readers for the popular market sort of surprised me, I spent much of the last 10 years or so pushing ebooks to get the common response of ‘but I like holding books, or I hate reading on screens’ type responses to now seeing the Oprah reading list being flogged by B&N and Amazon …
And I don’t think kindle/ebook reader, i think it is more likely to be a tablet. My perfect etext would actually be 2 tablets joined like a netbook. The text book would appear on the left side, and a note taking surface would be on the right [or reversed for lefties] You would be able to wirelessly connect to the school network to transmit the finished homework, and get schedule/syllabus updates. It would be able to hook up to a printer, and have a slot or several for removable media.
Honestly, if it were not for the jackasses in Texas and other scholastically handicapped morons interactive etexts are the perfect solution to the cost of school books. You don’t have warehouses of dead trees that can’t be updated, all you have to do is modify the file, and you can hot link multimedia, link it to fresh news in the subject [current affairs, new archeological findings, new discoveries by biologists, zoos, astonomy of the day, all sorts of wonderful resosurces.]
There are already college textbooks out there in Kindle and/or electronic format; however, some professors won’t let you use them
Guess which professors they are? They’re same professors who wrote the books and want the damn money for them. My daughter has experienced this on more than one occasion.
I was going to say, they are already doing it. My niece and nephew stayed with us recently with nary a book between them. When I asked they said, it’s all on here! [their laptops]
Well, there are a couple of projects to create free textbooks, so that the cost of the books need not be the barrier. Now, it’s certainly possible that the non-free textbooks may be better or preferred by the teachers, but at least it will be possible to eliminate the cost of the books. As I remember, these projects make the electronic versions of the books available for free while printed copies can be obtained for something like thirty dollars.
I wonder if the kids with books on laptops are using pdf’s? That would be tough reading. I hate reading more than a few pages of a pdf. I literally get a throbbing headache.
At least a Kindle tries to simulate the experience of reading a real book.
Kids losing textbooks is a major headache in many schools. Replace all their books with a Kindle and one of your major accomplishments is making it possible for them to lose all their books at once.
When possible, I buy my grad school textbooks for Kindle. It’s a lot easier to get my reading done when it’s always on hand in a portable package.
“Readers” are now a thing of the past, and teachers assign articles by .pdf on blackboard. I think most students eventually print these out, although sometimes I’ll do some of my class reading entirely online.
Right. Instead of having 6 things that are each $50 to replace, they only have one thing that is $50 to replace. The license on the textbooks will presumably be per-site or per-student, not per copy.
My daughter has 3 textbooks in digital form, that she can access from any computer, by logging in to the website. Impossible to lose or damage, but she does need internet access.
Ha! I’m at the University of Michigan in the new frajillion dollar building that features touch screen computers and plated glass everywhere, and the assholes still make us purchase bound coursepack (no one buys the textbooks except for one lone class). I’m really hoping next year they’ll make them available for purchase in PDF form so I can justify buying an iPad for school.
That said, ebooks are already available, even at “rent” prices. I took calculus classes at UCLA extension before I went back to school and I bought all my textbooks as e-book versions.
I’m not concerned about price. I’m concerned that the student will be completely without textbooks until the replacement unit is issued or the original is located. You may teach to a different demographic than the kids that I work with, but it is a rare day that there isn’t at least one kid per period wanting to borrow a book because they forgot/lost/somebody stole theirs. These kids will be spending the day with no books rather than just missing one.