Link to feature list and a pretty short video here http://www.inkling.com/ (the cool stuff is towards the end). I’m someone that cannot wait for textbooks to be fully electronic and therefore not take up reams of space upon my shelves, but others have said that they’d hate to give up the feel of books.
So I wonder if the added features demonstrated in apps like this would be enough to change your mind. 3D models, interactive maps and I think that shared annotation feature is pretty cool.
How long do people here think it will take for most textbooks to go digital? And will you be happy about it?
I would, but it appears to be only for the ipad. I honestly am rather anti-mac, but if you could put that on my regular tablet pc or laptop so that I could use it with something like onenote or evernote to write in information from class as I went, it would be worth it. I definitely love the idea of all digital books, and plan on using various methods when I upgrade my phone soon to consume information on a regular basis like I did before with my Palm. I figure that these things will start with the ipad, and then stretch out to other platforms. When that happens, I will definitely be a fan…
I can’t imagine missing physical textbooks. They’re so heavy and awkward to use and carry around, you often buy them used so they smell funny and have suspicious smudges, and because they’re so big they’re darned expensive… you either sell them back for a small fraction of the price at the end of the semester, or you keep them and they’re irrelevant three years later.
No, provided the prices were reasonable ($20 apiece?) I would gladly use electronic textbooks.
Disadvantages: can’t buy used, although piracy might take hold.
I don’t know how they’d justify charging $90 per etext but I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried. Perhaps a (claimed) result of aforementioned piracy, which will in turn make the latter more appealing. I remember buying a $100 biology text book several years back and it was paperback. I won’t miss them, but am not convinced that electronic ones are better.
Ah, but what makes you think the prices would be reasonable?
The same way they justify the prices on printed texts? It’s my understanding that the costs of printing are only a small fraction of what drives textbook prices. Rather, textbook publishers charge high prices because (1) there are lots of costs and complications involved in developing and marketing the textbook and, often, the ancilliary materials that are available with it, and (2) they can.
If it were a book that came “value added”, with interactive content and the ability to make annotations, I’d pay more. However, most of the textbooks I need tend not to have those features, but if the publisher offered future editions on a subscription basis to owners of the previous edition, I’d probably pay a little more for that.
Like brendon_small, I’m not a Mac fan. This would either have to be a stand-alone reader, or a program that would work with my Windows netbook. My lack of enthusiasm for Apple’s products isn’t for any philosophical reason. I just have fat fingers and a faster typing speed than most, which means I need a tactile keyboard, or a device that doesn’t require one.
I teach at a college and think this is most certainly the wave of the future.
As mentioned, easier than schlepping a bunch of textbooks around.
Plus, as a teacher they are now allowing me to go into a book, select the chapters I will be using that term, and arrange them as needed. This means as a student, you might not need to pay for 35 chapters, if we will only be going through 10 chapters - cheaper for the student, easier for the teacher to go from chapter to chapter. (And yes, the student does have the option to buy the entire eBook if they wish, even with only the shorter version being required for the class.)
You can also hook up some of these books to the overhead projector, so for the teacher, this means they can go through some parts (especially graphics and graphs) with the page(s) on a large screen.
I would not be surprised if this is pretty much the norm in a few years.
Personally, I’m a big fan of thiselectronic textbook. It has saved me a ton of money over the years - I rarely buy actual books and when I do, I get an old edition for 5$ or less because I’m smart enough to use both a Table of Contents and an Index to find various topics, and if the book is missing something, Google can find it for me. Often, I’ll use an entirely different book than the one assigned. In the rare event that my homework assignments are actual questions from the textbook, that’s what the library and a photocopy card are for!
The fun thing about engineering is that the laws of physics haven’t really changed much in the past little while, and so one explanation of how gears work (for example) is just as good as another. Also, every other school teaches the same stuff, and most of them post things online anyways.
I love textbooks. I love the feel and the smell. But, since I just today spent $630* on textbooks and not one of them was a science book (the ones I tend to think of as super expensive), I’d gladly trade the feel and smell if electronic books were more cost effective.
*Goddammitalltohell it should have only cost me $580 but I grabbed the wrong damn sociology book. Why are there 2 different books that have the words race and ethnic in the title?!?!?! I have to go back tomorrow to return it and get the right one.