Textbooks Enter the Digital Era
High-Tech options can save money and boost learning
Such attempts to curb the costs of printed textbooks are admirable, but innovative companies, faculty members, and students are exploring digital detours that eliminate the book altogether while enhancing the learning process. For example, Tom Doran helped found Freeload Press (textbookmedia.com). The venture, run by former textbook publishers, provides students with downloads of free E-textbooks and study guides in courses such as business, math, and computer applications. The downloaded "books" are subsidized by advertising from companies like Kinko's and Pure Vida Coffee that appears on the digital pages. (Freeload Press does not run ads from liquor or tobacco companies.) "With the broadband on campus, the time was right to do free E-books," Doran says. And ad-free paperback copies of Freeload textbooks can be ordered for $35, still a significant markdown on the triple-digit price tag of similar books.
Universities, in turn, are offering their own textbook innovations. Pomona College hosts a student-run book-swapping website. The University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point offers a textbook rental service for undergraduates and some grad students. The school buys the books, which students rent for about $65 a semester. And some instructors have taken more dramatic steps. Richard McCray, a retired professor of astronomy at the University of Colorado, became so fed up with the staggering cost of printed books that he and his colleagues wrote their own online texts. "I want students to learn the skills of finding information and discriminating between good and bad information," he says. "They are going to use the Web anyway; you want to teach them to use it in a discriminating way."
Across the board, instructors and publishers are looking beyond the book with the assumption that technology already has altered the way that students are learning. "Just look at Encarta," says Bruce Jacobsen, who spent almost a decade as an executive at Microsoft before founding an electronic textbook publishing house called Kinetic Books. "When [Encarta] came on the scene with instant searching, it was game over for the traditional print encyclopedia that had been standard for centuries."
Electronic texts, like the Kinetic Books' $40 Principles of Physics CD-ROM, look remarkably like the traditional textbooks, only students read them on a computer screen. They are an improvement over the traditional model in that they can include videos and simulations for the static images on the printed page. The chapter on acceleration, for example, has animated races between a tortoise and a hare, illustrating the principle. Jacobsen argues that the latest generations of E-books do more than merely electronically post the text of an existing book; they create a new model for teaching the material.
Generation text. The educational appeal of these digital textbooks-that they incorporate diverse tools into a single volume-also is confirming for some professors that it could be time to move away from the idea of a central course text altogether. Prof. Diane Ebert-May, who teaches plant biology at Michigan State University, says she hasn't used textbooks in her classroom for years-not even for majors. Instead, her students get a series of readings that address different topics. "Biology changes so rapidly that most of the readings in my class are not much older than 2004," she says. As for textbooks, she has some complimentary titles from publishers and keeps them on her classroom shelves for reference.
As the publishing landscape changes, academics are already thinking ahead to the next generation of print textbooks. A group of 50 leading teachers, technologists, and scientists studied the problem for the National Academy of Sciences last summer. They concluded that the next texts will look more like guidebooks travelers use to explore new cities than textbooks. They predicted that they will be far slimmer, customizable, and more challenging than their current incarnations. McCray, who contributed to the report, says that textbooks of the future will more likely point out interesting sights along the way, rather than drown the reader in monotonous detail."When you go to Egypt, you take along a Lonely Planet guide, not the Oxford History of Ancient Egypt." And that'll be a relief for many aching backs on campus.
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