“Poor books. Snubbed yet again, this time by a university, an institution of learning.”

The article describes the closure of one campus bookstore, causing confusion by students who walked into the building to find it being repurposed as classroom and office space.  Some of the books were moved to the other campus bookstore; the remainder were put into a storage room, and some will be returned to the publishers.

Ryerson’s students are mixed about the use of ebooks and web-based services like Amazon.  The author, though low-key in her wording, clearly sides with the printed book crowd and regrets the loss of the bookstore and the books within.  Of the many students with whom she could have discussed the issue, she chose a print-book lover:

Given the choice between a thick, hardcover text and a Kindle, Owens would choose the book. Better for the eyes, better to highlight with. He said it’s common for students to forgo texts and download course material onto their iPads and laptops, but that’s not for him.

And finally, a clumsy potshot at technology:

Pondering students of the future, Owens sees a post-analog world: “They’ll be plugging things into their brains and projecting images onto the inside of their eyes. We’ll be sitting there on our iPads going, ‘What the hell is that?’ ”

It surprises me sometimes to see the students of today, the workers and leaders of the future, already expressing dismay about technology and innovation; it’s a change in the academic air that is disconcerting.  These are traditionally the innovators of the world.  If they’re shying away from innovation before they’ve even left college, where will the future come from?

Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical support.

Students do like tablets such as the iPad, but they seem to be taking to Chromebooks just as well.

"Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you," said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She added, though, that Chromebooks have a place: "They will bow down and kiss your feet for a tablet or for a [Chromebook]. But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish."

Which type of device is better for education? The iPad will allow for interactive textbooks, but there’s no reason that such textbooks couldn’t be used on the Chromebook as well—indeed, Kno’s textbooks can be accessed from any web browser. And the Chromebook’s keyboard and Google Docs word processor means that students can write papers and other creative works on it much more easily than they could on the keyboardless iPad. At a suggested retail price of $349.99, the Chromebook is $150 cheaper than the basic iPad, too—a big savings when it comes to schools buying tens of thousands of them.

"It is exciting to see the book brought to life through digital enhancements by Kno," said Barbara Illowsky, a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, De Anza College [and co-author of the statistics textbook]. "The student feedback reinforces the need for more instructors to incorporate digital learning into the classroom to make learning fun and engaging."

Of course, the study was done by Kno, so it’s not terribly surprising that it produced positive results. But it’s interesting to see that the company will work with open-source material, not just locked-down stuff published by the big textbook companies. And the fact that 54% of students who used Kno textbooks received an A in the class might suggest a bright future for digital course material—at least at colleges.

(Found via EBookNewser.)

One of the things that digital content makes obvious is that the current physical manifestation of a print-bound textbook is a strangely awful construct — one designed to remove students one step (at least one step) from the primary sources that inform the field they’re studying. You don’t read Darwin; you read "Introduction to Biology." You don’t read de Tocqueville; you read "American History I." Sure, textbooks offer easier-to-digest summaries of the content, geared to the particular grade level of the student. They offer diagrams and illustrations and review questions and a glossary. But textbooks are always an assembly from a variety of sources, geared towards a classroom setting where the teacher leads students through the chapters and the exercises and the examinations. Neither the teacher nor the student is expected to be an expert. You just need to know enough to pass the test.

Digitizing that model of instruction changes nothing. Adding video changes nothing. Pinch and zoom and flashcards change nothing.

As for Apple’s $14.99 per student per year model for high school textbooks, Watters points out that a lot of high schools don’t buy new textbooks every year anyway, and if you look at that $14.99 per year as replacing an only slightly more expensive book that lasted several years, it may not be such a good deal after all.

And as for giving students their own permanent e-copy of the material, what student really ever wanted to keep a copy of his high school textbooks, anyway? And even if they had, taking advantage of it is still going to require getting those students their own iPads, an expensive (and currently far from universally-achieved) proposition.

She also has a few words for the iBooks Author e-book-making app, and its much-maligned license that restricts authors from selling their books through any other outlet than Apple. Apart from being restrictive, and providing no way to mark books that she wants to give away for free with a Creative Commons license, she notes that it is ultimately unnecessary—educators are already able to build their own digital textbooks, albeit without as “slick” tools as iBooks Author.

In the end, Watters writes, Apple’s digital textbook announcement is not the kind of revolution previously expected of Apple—it’s more of the same old same old, and “a slap in the face to educators and students.”

It really sounds like Apple set out to solve the wrong problem with this announcement, focusing on high schools when the real problem, and the much faster move toward e (since college students are more able to afford tablets), is college textbooks. It will be interesting to see what kind of deal Apple can offer them. But I can certainly see Watters’s point of view here—for high schools, this is not the sort of world-changer Apple has been known for in the past.

The program will be great for college students, Siegler points out. The idea of textbook prices capped at $15 makes the sting of not being able to “sell them back” a lot less painful. (Assuming that $15 applies to college as well as high school texts, of course.) But iPads are awfully expensive for high schoolers or their parents to be able to afford, especially in places like the inner cities where such a device might not necessarily remain too long in its owner’s possession if it’s seen in the wrong place.

Even if when the next iPad is announced, the current model drops in price to something like $400 — or even $300 — that’s still an expensive sell to high school students and/or their parents and/or their schools. If every kid in the world already had an iPad, this would be the most brilliant program ever. Unfortunately, Apple needs to sell at least a few billion more iPads to get to that point.

Siegler suggests that, to get to the bright future where students are able to keep their books on their tablets, we need to see about getting tablets in those students’ hands first.

Who knows? Perhaps in a few years we’ll have found a cheap enough display technology to make that happen.

But Apple may have more up its sleeve than just an e-book creation application. It may be planning announcements having to do with digital textbooks, especially considering that the iPad has a great big screen and multimedia capabilities that the company hasn’t really tapped yet for textbook applications.

[Inkling CEO Matt] MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can "kick up dust with the education market," which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple’s "GarageBand for e-books."

The Ars piece also notes that digital textbooks were one of Steve Jobs’s final projects, and might have originally been intended to announce back when the iPhone 4S came out in October. Jobs reportedly saw textbook publishing as an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”

It should be interesting to see what Apple has in store for us tomorrow. The idea of “destroying” the textbook industry sounds a little ambitious, but given what Apple’s accomplished over the last ten years it might just be entitled.

The features include metrics built into the textbooks that will track things like the time students spend reading, notes they’ve taken, and study habits. It will let them compare their own study habits to those of others, and let professors see how they’re using the texts. It also includes a feature that allows students to create their own flashcards on the fly and sync them to a cloud-based note-taking journal.

I wonder how I would have felt back in college if I knew the professors could see how much I was or wasn’t reading my textbook? On the one hand, it feels like a little bit of a privacy violation. On the other, it helps the professors do their jobs, which is to give students the education they’re paying for.

The CNet article also notes that Kno uses DRM on its e-textbooks, but uses the Marlin open DRM standard rather than something closed and proprietary. The books can be read on web browsers or via an iPad app, and an Android app will be coming within the month.

That’s the idea behind e-textbook site Bookstep.com. This startup allows students to buy just the portions of books and materials their professors need for their classes. Founder Mike Basaraba tells Publishing Perspectives:

We believe this approach yields an infinite number of choices to students and faculty; where both get a chance to enjoy real savings and the convenience of an electronic edition. Since our platform is completely agnostic, our pricing model permits mixing of content without running into copyright issues; our approach also benefits publishers and self-publishing authors.

The site offers students several subscription plans, including a pay-as-you-go option and six-month and 12-month full subscriptions. It also adds social networking and study tools, allowing students to connect with other students studying the same materials.

Basaraba sees digital as the ultimate future of textbook publishing, and predicts the landcape will look very different in five years.

I find the whole digital textbook market very interesting, simply because it’s so different from the standard fiction and nonfiction e-book market. Mass-market e-books tend to focus on just transposing the printed work to a digital version and leaving it at that, textbooks are seeing a lot more change and innovation. Perhaps it’s because mass-market books were already pretty much perfect the way they were, while nobody was really happy with textbooks but they were the only thing we had at the time. At any rate, it’s going to be fun to see how the next few years go. I wish this stuff had been around when I was in college.

Attention spans are short. E-readers are plentiful. Digital delivery is fast and convenient. How can university presses turn those facts to their advantage and attract readers who want bite-sized morsels of content?

Princeton University Press is about to test one approach with a new, e-only series. Called Princeton Shorts, it debuts November 9.

The article explains that Princeton Shorts will not be new material, like Kindle Singles; rather, it will be excerpts only of backlist material from Princeton University Press.  The full books will be available through Kindle and Google Books.

Princeton University Press considers this an experiment, hoping the ebook excerpts will drive customers to purchase the full books.  Other university presses will be keeping an eye on the experiment’s progress, as many of them are studying new ways of presenting their content, including schemes like selling textbook material on a chapter-by-chapter basis, based on class curriculum and assignments, and giving partially-loaded reading devices to students.

Much of this comes from Jobs’s authorized biography, which has been released to newsmedia in advance of its actual publication. Most of it isn’t really on topic for discussion here, but the New York Times mentions that Jobs was planning to hire textbook writers to create digital versions of their textbooks for the iPad.

He held meetings with major publishers about partnering with Apple, the book says. If textbooks were given away free on iPads he thought the publishers could get around the state certification of textbooks. [Biographer Walter] Isaacson said Mr. Jobs believed that states would struggle with a weak economy for at least a decade. “We can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money,” he told Mr. Isaacson.

I’m not so sure that states would have been terribly eager to let Apple do an end-run around the certification process, but who knows? Likewise, who knows whether we’ll actually see anything like this happen now that Jobs has passed away.

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

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has an interesting piece looking at some new interactive features in Kno’s e-textbook iPad app. One such feature is a form of 3D modeling that can convert chemical notations showing how atoms bond together into 3D models that can be enlarged and rotated so students can get a better sense of how the atoms bond together. The app also features video notes, smart links, and a “journal” that keeps track of audio, video, text, or highlighting notations students make.

As much as some people claim e-textbooks hinder rather than help learning, app features like this show that there are some ways tablet texts can help learning that teachers would have given their eye teeth for just a few years ago. The digital future looks very promising.

Students can use the iPhone’s camera to take pictures of the bar code of the items for a quick listing. Then they can print a shipping label, and Amazon will send them a gift card for the amount of the sale. Certainly a clever move on Amazon’s part, and another reason for college students to look to Amazon for more of their buying and selling needs (especially since Amazon offers its $79-a-year Amazon Prime service free to students).

Of course, this probably won’t work for e-books, but it still is bringing a lot of the benefits of electronic purchasing and selling to students’ pockets. This could help keep paper textbooks competitive with e-textbooks for a little while longer.

E-books are much more rigid [than print books]. Refreshing text on a screen is a far different, and far less flexible, process than flipping through pages. By necessity, a screen-based, software-powered reading device imposes navigational conventions on the user, allowing certain kinds of reading but preventing or hindering others. All sorts of modes of navigation and reading that are easy with printed books become more difficult with electronic books – and even a small degree of added difficulty will quickly frustrate a reader. Whereas a printed book adapts readily to whoever is holding it, an e-book requires the reader to adapt to it.

Certainly, print and e-books tend to be read in different ways, but it’s unclear whether e-books are really as damaging as Carr would have us believe. I would not be surprised to find there were other studies showing that e-reading helps education that Carr ignored in his own piece.

It’s worth noting that Carr has a reputation as a bit of a luddite. He’s posited that we don’t read much anymore because the Internet has harmed our attention spans, and seems to think that hyperlinks in text can be distracting and harmful. It’s not much of a surprise to discover that he thinks paper reading is better than e-reading, too.

(Found via eBookNewser.)

Read the full article at the Syracuse Post-Standard.

Via Seattle PI

(Photo: John Berry / Syracuse Post-Standard)