Wired’s Gadget Lab blog reports on the state of digital textbooks, and despite the optimism of some e-textbook manufacturers it isn’t really good. E-textbooks aren’t making much of a dent in the textbook market because most of the time buying and reselling used textbooks is still a better deal.
Even though the current generation of students are more dependent on digital technology and mobile devices than ever, most aren’t buying e-textbooks because they are pricier and more heavily restricted than paper books—locked down so students have only limited use of them, and sometimes even expiring after six months.
Platform fragmentation remains yet another impediment to e-textbook adoption. As the four major digital textbook publishers — Cengage, Pearson, Wiley, and McGraw-Hill — push for more dynamic experiences stuffed with audiovisual content, the question of platform support becomes increasingly relevant. Will an e-textbook work on your Kindle as well as your laptop? Will it be accessible from the HP Touchpad you picked up on the cheap? Do you have to have an open Internet connection to access the material? Depending on the e-textbook vendor, these answers vary, and they’re not always clear up-front.
Small wonder that more college students than ever are choosing to pirate their e-textbooks rather than buy them—and that some piracy sites try to cast their activity as a moral crusade against greedy publishers.
Wired also has a look at the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, iPad, Android devices, and HP TouchPad from the perspective of textbook reading
I wrote about this issue for this very blog about two years ago 🙂 The e-textbook I used was locked down so you could only use it on your computer (i.e. could not transfer it to a device to read on the go), was not fully searchable due to sloppy OCRing (callout boxes and other graphic-esque text was not OCRd and therefore could not be searched) and copying snippets for use in the compulsory online message board used for the class was not permitted. All you could do was sit at your computer and scroll, or else print out the whole thing onto paper. AND it expired as soon as the class was done. The price? Less than $20 cheaper than the proper paper book. If I am chained to my laptop, can’t search it, have to manually retype text if I want to cite things in course work or message boards just as I would for a paper book, and have to use my own paper and ink to get a paper copy, I may as well pay THEM for the paper upfront and forgo the e-version altogether. I have never used an e-textbook since. Take that, Pearson Educational Media. You have lost a customer for life.
Piracy sites always position themselves as a moral crusade. I’d like to position myself as better looking than George Clooney. Just because they say so (or I say so) doesn’t make it true. I’ve kept most of my textbooks for future reference so I agree that a 6 month expiration is a problem. And a sales price approximately equal to the hardback price minus hardback resale value (perhaps 25-35% of face value) makes sense to me. Publishers will more than make up for the lost revenue if pirating is minimized and if they can replace the used textbook market with new sales. It’s a win-win.