Last year California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger launched an initiative to replace printed textbooks with digital versions.  His motives were purely financial, and who could blame him? His state’s economy was in the toilet, and it still is. But before going all in on e-textbooks The Terminator wanted to get some feedback from end users.

He’s getting it in spades but it’s not what he wants to hear. Students around the nation are flunking the format. They want their paper books back. It seems that e-readers are okay for reading, but textbooks are seldom read immersively like novels, and so far the e-books can’t match the functionality of good old paper. And even when it comes to reading for pleasure, gadgets like the Kindle DX tablet did not fetch high grades.

The first school to check in was the University of Wisconsin after experimenting with the DX for a history course.  As we reported last January, “Many said in response to questions of the baseline survey that they preferred printed books for sustained and serious reading…Within a few weeks after the start of the [first] class several students had opted to buy paper copies of the books for some of the readings…They immediately perceived the cumbersome note-taking features and the lack of reliable pagination… The experimental project has uncovered faults so fundamental that this particular device will never be deployed for mass use by UW–Madison students.” (See Not So Fast, Guv! Wisconsin Students Not Ready to Terminate Paper Books.)

Results are now coming in on the DX from such schools as University of Washington, University of Virginia, Princeton and Reed College, a small campus in Oregon.  Typical were these observations by some students who “complained they couldn’t scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages or fully appreciate color charts and graphics,” writes Seattle Times business reporter Amy Martinez. One graduate student commented that “You don’t read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel. You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that. Also, the bookmarking function is buggy.”

Forrester Research analyst Sarah Rotman Epps was less generous. She simply declared the DX “a dud.”

Here’s one anecdote reported by Martinez:

“Wary of lugging a backpack full of textbooks on the University of Washington campus, Franzi Roesner couldn’t wait to get her hands on a new, lightweight e-reader from Amazon.com. Soon after receiving a Kindle DX, however, something unexpected happened. Roesner began to miss thumbing through the pages of a printed textbook for the answer to a homework question. She felt relieved several months later when required reading for one of her classes was unavailable on the Kindle, freeing her to use a regular textbook.”

Educators are more sanguine about Apple’s iPad, but it may just be that it’s the screen medium itself, not the device, that turns students off.

Martinez’s coverage of the story can be read here.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Seattle Times.

For years we’ve been wondering when schools would figure out that any e-book smaller than a tablet would simply not be feasible for the student market. Anne Eisenberg of the New York Times writes about an effort by one company, enTourage Systems, to produce a two-screen tablet-sized device called the “eDGe”.

It’s supposed to be released in February. It will sell for $490, not bad as prices for tablets are concerned. The device’s name comes close to falling into our Dumb Names category but at least we understand we’re supposed to pronounce it “Edge”. That’s better than the Que or Cool-er, neither of which we’re sure we know how to pronounce.* We do know how to pronounce Nook but that’s another story.

In any event this two-screen e-book reader will carry text on one screen and a liquid-crystal display on the other “to render graphics like science animations in color,” explains Eisenberg. “The e-reader screen is used with a stylus that can underline or highlight text, take notes in the margin, pull up a blank piece of e-paper for solving math problems, or touch a link for a video of a chemical interaction that is then displayed on the LCD screen.” In other words, it works like a tablet is supposed to work, except it comes in two parts held together by a hinge. It’s hard to say how seriously we’re supposed to take the eDGe – Eisenberg’s column is called “Novelties”.

eDGe is definitely a step in the right direction and might be what California’s governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had in mind when he promoted replacing paper textbooks with e- books (see Hasta La Vista, Textbooks). But we’re waiting for a true one-screen tablet such as that in development by Microsoft. And if we have a choice we’ll hold out for the rolltop we demo’d in the fall, a device so radically brilliant that I lost my cool and exclaimed, “I Want One Today!” Unfortunately, it appears to be a theoretical design, not a prototype. You should check it out anyway because it shows what an innovative designer can do when he let’s his imagination soar.

Read Eisenberg’s piece here.

*Just a footnote to our harping on dumb names. An anonymous commenter had made this shrewd observation on a recent posting on the subject: “Have you every tried to get a domain name for the Internet? Every word in every language has already been taken. If you have tried this before, you know what I’m talking about.

“Now add that frustration to the trademark search space. And then add in international trademarks and the resulting intersection leaves you with dumb names.

“That’s why today’s products are using these names: Hulu, Nook, TiVo, Blio, etc. It’s marketing that takes a nonsense word like Google and makes it a household word. The winners in the eBook space will do the same.”

Good point, Anonymous. I just wish the manufacturers of devices like the Cool-er and Que would give us a clue to pronouncing them. I have it anecdotally that they are pronounced “Cool-Ee-Arr” and “Cue” respectively. How much marketing would it have taken to tell us that much?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

Tom Simpson, who works at San Diego State University’s bookstore, may not condone some of the tactics students use to get around the exorbitant prices of textbooks, but he’s certainly sympathetic to their plight. He says so in a “Soapbox” guest editorial in Publishers Weekly. What inspired him was a recent sale he made to a student: two books for $325.

“This year,” he writes, “the college bookstore where I work has its first books priced north of $200. That price tag is painful in any year, but when people are hurting, it’s a travesty.”

Textbook prices have made a lot of headlines recently, highlighted by California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s initiative to push his state’s school system into e-textbooks. (Read Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.)

Is Simpson’s store selling e-textbooks? “Digital books have also seen an uptick in sales,” he says. “This semester we have 265 titles available in electronic editions, and with prices reduced to around 40% or 50% off the new hardcover price, an increasing number of students are willing to download a book or read it online.”

Students will do just about anything to hold down the cost of books, including buying used books and international editions, borrowing, sharing and renting. But when all legitimate approaches have been exhausted, there is always stealing. “Cheap is nice,” says Simpson wistfully “but free is better.”

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Publishers Weekly.

We’re not sure Arnold Schwarzenegger is handing out Terminator medals to schools switching to digital textbooks but if he is, the first one will go to Cushing Academy. The 144 year old New England prep school’s library has gone virtual with a total commitment to e-books, an initiative that California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has been promoting for schools in his home state.

Not only has Cushing purchased a set of Kindles and Sony e-book readers, but it has “given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks – the classics, novels, poetry, biographies, tomes on every subject from the humanities to the sciences,” writes The Boston Globe‘s David Abel. “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ says the headmaster. Obviously not one for half measures, he is purging the library itself and repurposing it. Writes Abel:

Instead of a library, the academy is spending nearly $500,000 to create a “learning center,’’ though that is only one of the names in contention for the new space. In place of the stacks, they are spending $42,000 on three large flat-screen TVs that will project data from the Internet and $20,000 on special laptop-friendly study carrels. Where the reference desk was, they are building a $50,000 coffee shop that will include a $12,000 cappuccino machine.

What to do with the librarian? “Liz Vezina, a librarian at Cushing for 17 years, said she never imagined working as the director of a library without any books.”

Years ago, I appalled an audience of librarians by suggesting that when digitized, the entire contents of the venerated New York Public Library could be stored in a small room, and the building could then be converted into condos. It was a joke (tasteless, admittedly), but I wonder if I gave the speech today whether anyone would even blink.

Read Welcome to the library. Say goodbye to the books.

(The empty library in the photo is not Cushing Academy’s, incidentally)

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The Boston Globe.

There’s some followup news of note on our story of last week, Hasta La Vista, Textbooks.

After Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger complained about the cost of print textbooks, which is adding to his state’s astronomical budget deficit, and joked about using heavy print editions to build muscles, international media giant Pearson took him up on his call for a e-book substitutes in science and math. Pearson is a world leader in education, business information and consumer publishing (they own Penguin Books, for example).

Craig Morgan Teicher of Publishers Weekly reports that Peter Cohen, Pearson’s CEO of North America school curriculum business, stated,“We believe it is important to take these forward steps toward an online delivery system and we are supporting the Governor’s initiative, recognizing there are numerous challenges ahead for the education community to work through.”

The changeover will not be achieved with a snap of the fingers. The California’s Free Digital Textbook Initiative spells out a number of the challenges that Pearson’s Cohen alludes to.

The California Learning Resource Network (CLRN) is responsible for reviewing these materials to verify that they are aligned to the California content standards. Qualifying mathematics courses include geometry, algebra II, trigonometry, or calculus. The science materials must be aligned to the standards for physics, chemistry, biology/life sciences, or earth sciences, including the investigation and experimentation strand. Digital textbooks should approach or equal a full course of study and must be downloadable.

Above is a photo of the Governor before his state’s financial woes bowed his shoulders.

RC

There’s nothing like a celebrity endorsement to boost a product, and e-books could not ask for a more renowned patron than Arnold Schwarzenegger. Though he stands at the pinnacle of fame as governor of California, it doesn’t take much to make him revert to his identity as The Terminator. In this case the things he wants to terminate are textbooks. After hefting a few, Schwarzenegger, arguably the greatest bodybuilder of all time, joked “I can use these for curls.”

But it isn’t the books’ weight that daunts him; it’s their cost. Waging a fight to the death to extirpate his state’s $24 billion budget deficit, he’s questioned whether printed textbooks are any longer viable, especially when schools buy revised and updated volumes every year or two. So, he’s now looking into taking California’s educational system digital.

Mark Tran, writing for the UK’s Guardian website, picked up on a statement of Schwarzenegger’s that appeared in a California newspaper:

“It’s nonsensical and expensive to look to traditional hard-bound books when information today is so readily available in electronic form. Especially now, when our school districts are strapped for cash and our state budget deficit is forcing further cuts to classrooms, we must do everything we can to untie educators’ hands and free up dollars so that schools can do more with fewer resources.”

Tran says the Guv wants to replace high school math and science books with e-book readers, which can hold all the schoolbooks students will ever need. And let’s not forget that updated and revised editions are simply one refresh away.

Read Arnold Schwarzenegger to scrap school textbooks in favour of ebooks.

RC