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Reading in the Dark Ages

It’s 2011 already. What’s the holdup with e-readers designed for the needs of academia?

I was on the subway, coming home from an appointment in Manhattan (I live in Brooklyn), when I noticed the young woman next to me reading through a sheaf of stapled paper.

Out of the corner of my eye, I looked more closely at her reading matter. (You become quite adept at “eavesreading” after a quarter-century of riding the subway.) What I saw amazed, amused, and annoyed me.

The packet the young woman held was a compilation of different essays on child development and learning (Erikson, Piaget, and the like). Judging from its cover page, I could tell the woman was a graduate student in education. This was clearly her child-development course “text.”

My jaw dropped. When I was a grad student in the early ’80s teaching freshman composition, I put together “textbooks” like this—essays from different authors published in different books, copied and collated by the local copy center where students would pick up their course packs.

Call me naive, but I am stunned—and peeved—that in 2011 college classes still issue photocopied course packs.

I’m going to assume that her professor obtained copyright clearance for reproducing these essays. (Which is more than I can say for my colleagues and me in 1983, when we assured ourselves that we were not violating any copyrights because we were using the texts for “educational purposes.” University counsel must have been absent for that faculty meeting.) But why couldn’t the instructor have done an electronic compilation through the school LMS, or Google Books, or Open Library? I’m sure that this young woman would have preferred to have these articles on her iPhone rather than in a stapled mass, whose over-copied, blurry text was certainly no testament to the unbeatable resolution of the printed page.

Lest anyone mistake me for an anti-print person, let me be clear that I am a paper-trained reader and I love physical books. (N.B.: I’m writing this essay for a print magazine.) I don’t even own an e-reader or (gasp) an iPad.

But when it comes to college reading, I can’t help but want to scream: Please, please, let’s get a move on to electronic texts! Students spend a scandalous amount of money on bloated, overweight textbooks that are, most times, of no further use after the course is finished.

I’m not suggesting that reading a PDF is a more satisfactory experience than reading a textbook. And, as we have reported in the pages of this magazine, academic reading is not the same as reading for pleasure—the electronic readers out there (even the iPad) are still not optimized for reading for learning.

What is holding us up? As my dad would say, we can put a man on the moon, yet we can’t make an e-reader that students can skim, dog-ear, and notate? Please.

Don't miss John K. Waters’ excellent article on where the e-textbook is headed in our March issue.

About the Author

Therese Mageau is the Editorial Director for the education group at 1105 Media, where she oversees the content and direction of T.H.E. Journal and Campus Technology magazines and digital products. You can contact her at tmageau@1105media.com.

Comments

Tue, Mar 22, 2011 Maree Conway

What is holding us up? The mindsets and worldviews of people who are tied to traditional models and ways of doing things - even if they don't admit it to themselves. The way we do business and current business models are holding us up. Archaic copyright rules/laws are holding us up. But, imagine all these issues are overcome during the next decade or two - assuming both technology continues to develop 'better' readability tools and the textbook publishing model continues to transform to electronic platforms. What would e-textbooks look like then, what would an e-reader look like, and how would students be using them? How would we want students to be using them in a learning context? How do we start planning for that? Are these the sorts of questions we should be asking today as well?

Tue, Mar 22, 2011 Angie

With all the free materials out there on the Internet, I long ago quit requiring my speech students to buy a textbook. I tell them to search for the info themselves and provide short pieces that I write myself. I also recommend a QuickStudy reference that cost on average $5. They seem to have little trouble learning this way. Some subjects may still need extensive texts, but my fortune to not teach one that does benefits my students in more ways than one. As a graduate student I also hated textbooks, mostly due to the weight and expense. I preferred finding the info myself as well. So, I have never asked my students to do something that I haven't already done. I've never had a student ask me to please assign a textbook. My no textbook policy seems to work just fine.

Tue, Mar 22, 2011 JJ

There are many fundamental problems with all mobile reading devices (ipad, Kindle and others) that have yet to be addressed when it comes to making them available to the educational sector. I know, I'm trying to do this myself. The problems are simple and overwhelming at the same time. For starters you have the copyright issue as stated by theveep, and then you have the standardization of the reading format, the lagging in readily available content, the lagging in the publishing industry to convert Higher Ed and K-12 publications and the enormous lack of funding in education in general. Then you have to look into the technical aspect of the device. I know of no company who can sustain the selling and MAINTAINING of these devices, long term, not even Apple. Can you imagine a district like NY Public Schools, purchasing 300K of these devices, giving them out to Middle School kids and Sr. High students? One drop, one malfunction-software or hardware and the student is left WITHOUT the ability to read his/her text books. The risk factor in converting print to digital in Education; be it in Higher Ed or in K-12 is colossal. Bottom line, the market is ready, the students are ready and have been ready, the educators are ready, but the money, the technology, the standards and the manufacturers are not ready. It's coming, have no doubt in that, but it's going to take a while. Cell phones and smart phones; forget them. If you had to keep up with research, homework, essays and all the other documents involved in Education today on a 4” screen every day, you’d be blind by eighth grade. I feel the frustration of the writer and of those that comment, but you’ll have to give it some more time. The day will come when a student in college or 5th grade can trade in the back pack for a small carrying case, with an educational TOOL like an ipad, that can fully interact with digital content, the internet and education, that is affordable, easily replaced, standardized, with Wi-Fi, a really good battery life and a nice screen size. Soon, very soon.

Tue, Mar 22, 2011 jk

eReaders might work for hypertext searching, but what of annotation and marginalia and when batteries run out? This 2nd- or 3rd- generation push to force the globe to read from a digital device remains ridiculous. The "wonders" of those over-priced phones/tablets are stressed; there is nothing mentioned about the convenience of the reader or the quality of content being read.

Tue, Mar 22, 2011 Cathy

I agree with theveep, publishers make it quite difficult to obtain permissions for re-use of their work, via high fees or just sheer lack of response. I got a kindle last semester because I had heard about the notetaking and highlighting features. They are difficult to use and I abandoning them so I could get some work done. And I'm not going to use anything that I need to convert. I'll print it out. I'm not alone in this. And not all of us have iPhones. Or even want to read large blocks of text on them.

Tue, Mar 22, 2011

This statement alone shows how out of touch the author is: "As my dad would say, we can put a man on the moon, yet we can’t make an e-reader that students can skim, dog-ear, and notate? Please." There are e-readers and and e-textbooks that do this and have for a few years. I expect better from "Campus Technology"

Tue, Mar 22, 2011 bgibson135

If you were using Kindles, you probably could use Calibre to convert content into a format that would allow highlighting and notes.

Thu, Mar 10, 2011

as a college text manager i can tell you that, at least here, the actual print text is far preferred over the less-expensive e-texts when given the option of either. the electronic reader option would have to come a long way from were they are to make a digital text remotely comparable interface to a print text

Wed, Mar 9, 2011

How can the the author be sure it wasn't an electronic course packet? Quite a few course packets are now offered for free on electronic reserve in the library. But what do students do? They print them to read.

Wed, Mar 9, 2011 theveep

This author did not do her homework. Many publishers do not give permisson to allow their materials to be reproduced digitally. It is just barely approching 50%. We clear copyright and create readers for 15 different colleges and getting digital permission is difficult. The other obstacle is that if we do get digital permission, we have to scan the materials. Scanned materials are not compatible with any e-reader software and therefore are not interactive (i.e. no hightlighting, to notes, no sharing, etc.) Only materials created as a WORD doc and then coverted to PDF can be made interactive.While we would love to offer more items digitally, professor's selections are severely limited. Until publishers give digital copyright permission for 100% of their materials, hard copy course packs are here to stay.

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