E-textbooks: The New Best-sellers[?]
Posted by Celia Walter | 11 Mar, 2010Will Apple's iPad kill the textbook?
Many educators are pointing to Apple Computer's recently announced iPad as the prototype for an e-reader that will be able to hold all the textbooks a student needs. Its color touch-screen, interactive-video capability and virtual keyboard, they say, give it greater potential for textbook users than monochrome readers like Amazon's Kindle.
While some students may be using notebooks or their more portable cousins, netbooks, to read textbooks, some experts predict that within the next 10 years, most U.S. college students -- and many high-school and elementary-school students as well -- will probably be reading course materials on an electronic device instead of in a paper book. And that will have a broad impact on students and teachers, not to mention the $9.9 billion textbook-publishing business...
Digital textbooks will need to have features students take for granted in paper books, such as the ability to highlight key passages and take notes that can be attached to pages. Digital versions also need consistent pagination so that teachers can give assignments. Even with a search function, digital books will still need tables of contents, indexes and glossaries.
Even with these limitations, digital presentation opens up a number of new possibilities for textbooks. With interactive graphs in an economics book, for example, students could try different costs to see the impact on demand or different supply levels to gauge the change in price. ScrollMotion promises publishers that its technology will let them embed video that students can watch, record lectures linked to chapters and offer self-assessment tests...
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