The editorial is titled, “College students will stick to paper books” and was published by Washington Square News today. From the Editorial: The benefits of these e-Textbooks include the ability to quickly search through large amounts of text, insert marginalia in electronic comment boxes and access hyperlinks. Yet the tactile quality of textbooks, something e-Books will never have, allows readers a certain intimacy with their academic material. It’s a lot easier to curl up in bed with a textbook than it is to go to bed with a hunk of heated metal by your side. It is evident from the limited success of...

E-textbook company Kno has popped out a press release saying that it found 95% of college students who used its e-textbook application “found it very useful and plan to use it again”. The company conducted a study with four California community colleges, on 400 students and faculty in 27 classes using an open-source statistics textbook. "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...

On TechCrunch, MG Siegler looks at the new education programs launched by Apple and what they really mean for high schoolers. In Siegler’s opinion, not much. While they might give college students incentive to get iPads, he finds it doubtful that most high school students will be able to get their own, in keeping with Apple’s stated goal that students should be able to buy e-textbooks and keep them forever. 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...

From the Indiana University press release: As textbooks continue shifting to digital, Internet2, McGraw-Hill and Courseload today announced implementation of an eText Pilot Trial Pack to students and faculty at five universities for the Spring 2012 semester. The five institutions, also Internet2 members, include: University of California, Berkeley; Cornell University; University of Minnesota; University of Virginia; and the University of Wisconsin. The pilot, which is based on Indiana University’s successful eText model (http://etexts.iu.edu), provides a timely and simple way for universities to quickly assess a new model for digital course materials. While an increasing number...

Can't do this with ebooks, I'm afraid!  Check out all of them here....

From Inside Higher Ed: … a recently completed report on a yearlong pilot at Daytona State, comparing the satisfaction and success of students using all electronic texts with students using all print, has also complicated the picture. ... “Avoid top-down mandates,” the study’s authors wrote as their top recommendation. “Institutions that require all instructors to simultaneously go e-text might be courting disaster.” The majority of the students in the study who used exclusively e-texts came away dissatisfied. While they appreciated that there was no possibility of losing or forgetting their textbooks when they could be simply summoned to a device, the students told officials that...

I’m sure everyone who went to college has had the experience of having to buy a whole book when their professor only turned out to need a few chapters from it. One of the obvious benefits of digital media is that it is more easily segmented than a printed and bound book; in theory, students ought to be able to buy just the parts they need. 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: ...

Economist David Harrington has an article looking at anti-plagiarism service Turnitin, discussing how effective it is, how easy it is to fool, and how it can actually help students conceal evidence of their plagiarism. One of the points Harrington makes is that Turnitin can’t scan the whole web. Using the example of a book that read like it was in large part cribbed from New York Times articles, he found that Turnitin wasn’t able to index the Times articles because the site’s archives are behind a paywall. And another point is that the service offers a tool...

From the press release: A CampusBooks.com report shows that six out of seven top e-book retailers (including Amazon) have less than 50% of the books students need for back-to-school. But CampusBooks is the first to solve that problem, launching a free online e-textbook tool that lets students search all seven to not only find their books, but the best prices as well. CampusBooks.com has been helping students find the best prices on ...

We’ve mentioned Nature’s on-line learning project Scitable before. Now TechCrunch has a feature on a new, related project from Nature: an on-line biology textbook that costs $49 and comes with lifetime updates so it will never become obsolete to someone who purchased access. Rather than an app or e-book, Principles of Biology will be presented as a website, accessible from any Internet-enabled device. This will also make it more accessible to screen readers and other devices that special-needs readers already use for working with computers day to day. There will be some DRM on the project, but Nature feels...

Inside Higher Ed has an article about a new survey from the Student Monitor that is showing this. The survey, which polled 1,200 full-time students (average age: 20.6) at four-year institutions in March, found that the proportion of students who rented at least one textbook this spring doubled from last spring, leaping from 12 percent to 24 percent. Students who rented reported an average savings of $127. And the renting trend shows no sign of slowing: 36 percent of underclassmen said they are either likely or very likely to rent at least one textbook next semester. The most popular rental source was...

The article will appear (TBA) in Information Technology and Libraries from the Library and Information Technology Association (LITA). Author: Nancy M. Foasberg Title: Humanities Librarian Affiliation: Queens College, City University of New York From the Abstract: To learn whether e-book readers have become widely popular among college students, this study surveys students at one large, urban, four-year public college. The survey asked whether the students owned e-book readers and if so, how often they used them and for what purposes. Thus far, uptake is slow; a very small proportion of students use e-readers. These students use...