Electronic Textbooks: The Future?

Piracy of media products, from video and music, to full length downloadable text books, is nothing new. You can get the complete works of Piers Anthony, Emily Dickens, or Shakespeare from many online sources, most of which are completely illegal. Now you can torrent full college text books right along with this weeks latest Lost episode.

Publishers, understandably, are furious about pirated texts. They want you to pay that hefty $100+ at the college book store so they get their profit, the author gets his royalty, and everyone is happy. Everyone except the struggling student with tuition, food, fees, and everything else on top of pricy books, to buy.

I paid $300 for books the first semester, and another $200 the second semester. Considering I'm an art major and most of my classes didn't require books I got off lucky. A girl taking business classes paid over $600 the first year for the five books she needed. One of her texts, the one she couldn't get and thus ended up dropping the class because of, cost over $200 just by itself. And these were used.

True, creating these books takes a lot of research, paper, editing, more paper, and publishing. But if you cut out all the paper by going electronic much of the cost of a book, past editing, is done away with.

I've been drooling over the Kindle since it first appeared on the front page of Amazon. At $350 it's actually the cheapest gadget of its type out there, but still not within my reach. Not YET anyway.

But the Kindle seems to be the perfect solution to so many things.

I've long thought they should dispense with paper books in schools and go to electronic texts. With articles about back problems due to weight in backpacks, vandalized and destroyed books and lockers that are constantly broken into, it just seems to be a smart move to put all textbooks in one easy to read location.

The Kindle offers bookmark and note taking capabilities. It protects copy write. It would be easy to link kindles to a school database so that all students in a particular class get a particular book. The school could then either be charged per copy like a rental fee, thus allowing them to change books every year instead of once every five or ten years (outdated, or simply wrong textbooks are often a problem especially in smaller school districts). Or they could be charged outright for unlimited sharing between a given network.

A major problem with text books, especially in colleges, is that they often have one chapter added, or minor adjustments throughout, making the book someone just bought for one term obsolete, and thus they can't exchange it for credit on the next terms books. With an electronic version you could charge update fees, a small price for a book you already have. At lower fees college students won't mind the fact that they would not be able to get credit for the electronic version, changes or not.

Another benefit to moving text books to the Kindle, or a similar technology, would be the millions of pounds of paper saved every year from printing books. Paper, and trees, that could easily be used for something else.

On the up side, Stanford and other schools have started offering some coursework on iTunes. Flat World Knowledge has begun testing a new system that looks promising. Through their open platform, students will have access to complete textbooks free of charge, with the option to purchase affordable alternate formats of the content (i.e. print & audio versions of the text, podcast study guides, mobile phone flash cards, etc.).

However, there is still a long way to go.

There will always be those who fight against new technology, but if we start our children with it young it will make transition easier, and may facilitate the expansion and growth of tech in the future, as each generation wants something better then the one before it.

We've been moving steadily closer to a paperless society with check cards, bill paying online, and even newspapers adventuring into cyber space. Electronic textbooks would be a huge step forward for electronic print.