St. Joe News, the Kansas City Star, and the Associated Press are all carrying stories about Northwest Missouri State University‘s e-textbook program, which is expanding this year from 200 students to cover about 4,000 of the university’s 6,500 students.
Dean L. Hubbard, the university’s president, says that they are limited in that some textbooks they need are not yet available as e-books. “But I would think as a realistic measure we could be totally out of the printed textbook business in three years.”
The pilot program used Sony Readers, but students felt the devices had some shortcomings in terms of not being able to jump rapidly from page to page to look up references, or take notes within the texts. Sony is incorporating feedback from the program into a more educational-based prototype, but Northwest is going ahead with a laptop/notebook-based plan for the Spring semester.
The university eventually hopes to offer e-textbooks in a variety of formats, “including laptops and iPods.”
Northwest is already a slightly unusual college in that it rents textbook bundles out to students instead of requiring them to buy and resell, and it also issues each new student a laptop.
