From chalk and talk to screen
Third level professors are among some of the early adopters of eBook technology. Some universities have had eBooks for almost a decade and in the US, a selection of students will try out Amazon’s Kindle reader instead of traditional course books this coming autumn.
Professor Manuela Soares teaches on the postgraduate publishing degree at Pace University in New York. She previously led a team developing eBooks when she worked for the publisher Scholastic in the mid 1990s.
“The process was so difficult”, she recalled, “the readers were, I thought, ineffective, not very easy to use and expensive, there wasn’t an awful lot of content and it never really took off. And I totally understood that because (a) you didn’t have the technology and (b) you didn’t have the content”.
She says the wider range of digital content now available through Google Books and the Gutenberg eBook project as well as major developments in technology have helped make eReaders “so successful in the past few years”.
Masters students on the publishing course beginning at Pace University in Autumn 2009 will mainly use the Kindle DX rather than buying printed texts. Professor Soares is interested in how students will respond to using an eBook reader at university, although she plans to use some traditional text books.
She muses about the future, hoping that children, in particular, will still remain interested in printed books.
“I’d like to think that children, even though they might go through a period where the computer is paramount, at some point they will return to books or that they will always have a connection to the printed page”, she says.
At City University in London, Dominic Vaughan also teaches postgraduate publishing students. In a sample survey of his class, he says students were not overly enthusiastic about eBook readers.
“Not a single one wanted to get hold of a Sony reader or a Kindle or any of the other specifically dedicated book readers”.
He says that while some download digital resources “onto their laptops and a few have got stuff sent to their mobile phones in a variety of ways” that an average price of £300 pounds for “another piece of kit to carry around” was too much.
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In June 2009, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger announced a plan to introduce eBooks in California's state schools. This audio report examines the potential impact of this initiative.
Implications for future of education
Dr Steven Coombs is Head of Continuing Professional Development at Bath Spa University. He has trained teachers and educators in the UK and specifically in the State of California. Here he speaks about the implications of using an eBook rather than a printed book.
He suggests some positive possibilities which could be explored.