

In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks - edw519
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/20/nyregion/20textbooks.html?pagewanted=print

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ajdecon
Especially when multiple books are assigned for a class, physical textbooks
have one tremendous advantage: as distinct objects, they're _great_ for
multitasking and reference.

I can't count the number of times I was working on problem sets, and spread
out in front of me on the floor or a big table: two or three different books
open to relevant pages, class notes, scratch paper, _and_ a laptop for Google.
An unholy mess, but I needed all those resources! If they were all electronic,
it would have looked neater to an observer, but I would have either needed six
monitors or I'd have been in Alt-Tab hell. All my classmates had the same
working style, though that may have been a peculiarity of my physics
department.

E-books are good for linear reading (ie fiction), and for keyword searching.
They are not (yet) as good for browsing and non-search random access, or for
being able to look at multiple resources simultaneously. And I had to do a lot
of that in college.

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Groxx
Maybe once digital books and/or their interfaces stop being made of _shit_ the
tables will turn.

Every damn one of them has _some_ inane lock-down that any student you ask
will run up against, but has no conceivable purpose. And then there's the TOC
at the beginning - less than 1/4 of the ones I've encountered even link to the
pages they reference, and all non-linking ones I've encountered are incorrect
because PDF pages are != book pages (they include the cover). Far far less
likely for the index or glossary to be linked (though then there's searching).

They're not selling because publishers are doing _squat_ to make them worth
buying. Or even _existing_ beyond being a faster way to search.

~~~
Mahh
It would be pretty powerful if online textbooks linked together like
wikipedia. It wouldn't be too hard for a online textbook company to create a
script to find instances of words from their index and link them together. If
I could mouse over an important vocab word and have other relevant pages pop
up, then online textbooks could be seen as more powerful than paper, rather
than as an alternative.

Makes me think about why online dictionaries are so powerful compared too
flipping through paper dictionaries.

Personally, i tried to buy online versions of my textbooks, but they required
me to download their own client to view the textbooks, which didn't work in
ubuntu(I wasn't being stubborn about switching to windows, my textbooks were
for programming classes so I definitely needed to stay in my programming
environment). I can understand not needing to cater to the small niche of
people in linux, but a web based app to view the textbooks through the browser
would have been much more pleasant for everyone of any OS.

~~~
Groxx
As to the download-their-own-inevitably-crappy-client problem, there's a
solution for multiple OSes: Java. A _couple_ have used Java that I've seen,
but they're always shockingly poorly implemented and slow. Java _can_ be fast,
it just takes smart developers.

Though now that Oracle has it, who knows where it's going to be in a few
years.

I _want_ to like ebooks and the readers, and I _want_ them to succeed. But it
seems anyone with the ability to push out anything with copyrighted content is
going about it ass-backwards, and the free/open crowds aren't usually a whole
lot better because they're taking cues from the crap that publishers release.

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skowmunk
I am not very surprised......I like to use a combination of physical and
digital copy of a book. Sometimes I just like to write down notes, hell lot of
them while learning something new from a book, makes it lot more interesting
and engaging.

Once I do some basic learning, its great convenience to be able to search for
exactly what I want to refer by using search in the soft copy.

Features-wise, two things would be critical for me to switch completely to
e-books:

1) Abitlity to take notes or jot down thoughts on the sides of the pages or
markup/underline important sections - can't do without it, it would be too
boring to even try reading without being able to do that.

2) Ability to look at multiple pages at the same time - can't do without that
too. sometimes its just important for me to be able to look at different pages
without having to scroll through the whole lot of pages in between

Coming to think of it, these are not impossible for a dedicated developer to
do - probably the pages of interest could be tagged that would allow toggling
and can be looked at in multiple windows within the same app window, like
looking at multiple files in excel.

somebody gotta try it!

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assemble
I don't know why everybody keeps trying to digitize books. I know it's cheaper
to give someone a download than to make an actual book, but I'm willing to pay
more for a print version. Print versions don't strain my eyes as much as
computer version, they also look better in my opinion.

If you try taking notes in almost any engineering class on a computer the
symbols are such a pain to input on a computer that it's far easier to take
notes on paper. (Plus, I actually remember things that I write. I don't
remember a lot of things I type.)

I believe that some things in life don't need to be digitized--textbooks and
note-taking are two.

~~~
mechanical_fish
_I don't know why everybody keeps trying to digitize books._

It makes sense when your reading pattern is either:

A) Books sit on the shelf until you want to look something up in them, at
which point you take one down, find what you're looking for, read it and/or
copy it down, and then put the book back;

B) You decide to read a book, so you take it down and more-or-less read it
through. It's especially handy to have a digital version if you're trying to
do this on the train.

But if you're doing the kind of research where you cross-reference a large
pile of books, or you're studying intensely from a bunch of books at the same
time, paging back and forth in each one to cross-reference it with _itself_
\-- i.e. if you're doing academic research or taking college classes -- yeah,
e-books are pretty lousy. But you won't be in college forever. And I find that
once I've moved my physical book collection around enough times I get pretty
tired of having a physical book collection.

~~~
assemble
I suppose there are a few applications where e-books are handy, but if I'm
traveling I normally read magazines. The idea of reading while commuting would
be bad: I live in the Midwest--there isn't much in the way of public transit.

I'm not in college anymore, but I sold the books back unless they were
particularly interesting. Even now, I prefer to buy programming reference
books than using online references. If I can only find a manual online, half
of the time I wind up printing it out and putting it in a binder. I write lots
of stuff in the margins of reference books.

------
Janteh
None of my textbooks have digital versions available. I would switch if I
could.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Not me. In the last few weeks, I've probably printed out 500 sheets (printed
double-sided) of paper copies of articles I have in electronic form, as part
of research I am doing for my Master's thesis. Paper trumps electrons when it
comes to serious reading, in my experience.

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thecoffman
My general rule of thumb is that I read ficton/nonfiction entertainment books
on my Kindle. Its fast and convenient and I don't have to cross reference or
compare, I just read from front cover to back cover. For reference or
programming/math etc books I still always buy a book copy instead of a digital
one. There isn't an effective way to have multiple books open at once on an
ereader; nor is there a quick way to flip back and forth between different
locations. Until eBooks advance to that stage, I can't see this changing.

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mrmekon
Digital versions aren't a good enough replacement for a physical textbook yet.
I've used the Nook e-books (on a PC, not on a tablet), and the interface is
hell to deal with. But they are fantastic supplements to the real book.

I think they would be a lot more popular if the publishers did with textbooks
what record companies are doing with vinyl records: buy the textbook, get a
code to download a free digital copy too.

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mrj
I wrote about my experiences with NOOKStudy:

[http://www.publicstatic.net/2010/10/nookstudy-not-so-
great-f...](http://www.publicstatic.net/2010/10/nookstudy-not-so-great-for-
studying/)

To summarize:

\- The reader sucks

\- No price advantage over renting

\- Have to "return" the textbook, no option to keep it if you wanted to

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mian2zi3
I don't understand why digital book sharing hasn't caught on like music/movie
sharing, which undisputedly thrived among college students, at least until
reasonable alternatives like iTunes and Amazon Music Store came along. You
could read digital or print out a hardcopy. Every school I've been to had
plenty of print quota for that. I imagine kids are spending more on books than
they did/are on music. Is it just the difficulty of scanning/printing?

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tomjen3
Most of my exams have been open book - how do you bring a digital book to an
open book exam when they won't even let you bring a cell phone?

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icegreentea
I wish every textbook purchase came with a scan. Or at least an electronic
version of the questions.

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lhnn
The problem with textbooks is the price, and the scam publishers use to get
you to buy a new edition every six months, making previous versions useless.

I wish some large schools would make publishers sign 'support contracts'
enforcing that Edition X of a book would be available for at least 3 years, or
similar.

Alternatively, professors could just stop mandating new versions of books
every semester. I bet my calculus book from 5 years ago is still relevant.
Heck, I bet my dad's calculus book is relevant.

....

I miss college.

~~~
joezydeco
When did they start putting out textbooks as unbound stacks of 3-hole punched
sheets? My wife is taking a language class and this loose stack of paper is
her "textbook".

So to add to the insult of having to buy a binder to hold the damned thing,
how do you sell this thing back? How do you know all the pages are there?

