From an Article by Lisa W. Foderaro:
They text their friends all day long. At night, they do research for their term papers on laptops and commune with their parents on Skype. But as they walk the paths of Hamilton College, a poster-perfect liberal arts school in this upstate village, students are still hauling around bulky, old-fashioned textbooks — and loving it.
Though the world of print is receding before a tide of digital books, blogs and other Web sites, a generation of college students weaned on technology appears to be holding fast to traditional textbooks.
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For all the talk that her generation is the most technologically adept in history, paper-and-ink textbooks do not seem destined for oblivion anytime soon.
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In two recent studies — one by the association and another by the Student Public Interest Research Groups, a national advocacy network — three-quarters of the students surveyed said they still preferred a bound book to a digital version.
Access the Complete NY Times Article
See Also: We’ve posted not only the report by the Student Public Interest Research Groups mentioned in the article but also this report from the University of Iowa with some actual e-text sales numbers.
Via Resource Shelf
What fails to be appreciated here, imho, is that we are in a Digital Transition Age, not the Digital Age. Not yet.
eReaders are in their infancy. Students stick with paper because the software and interactivity is not yet there in eReaders and Tablets. This is not surprising.
When these devices and their UI progress and mature, paper will start to fade.
Howard’s right. Current ebook readers like my Kindle are fine for reading novels and biographies, but they come up sorely lacking in the features students need. For that, paper is still much better. The formatting can be more complex, making a book easier to understand. A printed book can be read anywhere from a darkened room to a sunny lawn. And pencils, pens and highlighters are far better and quicker for markup.