E-texbooks – yes, please!

January 24, 2012

{Note: This is in response to an article in Slate: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/01/apple_s_e_textbooks_should_be_free_textbooks_.html?wp_login_redirect=0 ]

Why do people keep focusing on the idea that e-textbooks should be free? Why should they be? Writing a really good textbook is hard work, and requires a serious knowledge of the field, the issues, and the educational context in which the book is being read. At the college level, textbooks are typically written by professors who have spent years in their field and bring a high level of expertise and classroom experience to their presentation.

Just because a textbook isn’t printed on paper doesn’t mean it’s given out to the public for free – Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble all charge for ebooks. Ebooks can be sold more cheaply given the lack of printing and shipping costs, and the lack of unsold copies as the book’s popularity wanes.

With textbooks, “e” versions offer even more benefits. Editions can be updated automatically to incorporate new information or revise the existing text. Moreover, e-textbooks can incorporate all sorts of information and capabilities that printed books cannot – videos, slide shows, clickable links to articles or background information, readers can also search electronically for any topic within the book.

A lot of commenters deride the idea of “glitzy” presentation as a distraction from the hard work of a serious textbook. But individual students have many different learning styles, and different forms of presentation may work for different students. In my days as a student, textbooks were a deadly experience – I would have loved to have had a livelier alternative.

E-textbooks would also be much more flexible and customizable. Many textbooks are huge because they want to include a wide range of materials for teachers to choose from. In literature, for example, anthologies for introductory courses include far more stories, poems and plays than any professor can cover. With an e-textbook, teachers could choose what they wanted. In addition, teachers could add their own material to the mix, to incorporate their own articles or presentations or notes and to add material that might not be in the textbook.

The “solution” suggested by some people of having textbooks written for hire by a well-meaning foundation and distributed for free sounds good, but would seriously limit the choice of textbooks – in today’s market textbooks compete with one another, and committees of teachers review different books to see which ones are better than the others and which ones best fit their school’s curriculum and approach. And why would we expect that the writers selected by a foundation would be the best writers for the job? Foundations are usually staffed by well-educated and well-meaning, serious people, who are likely to favor writers with serious and sober approaches to the subject. Ugh.

There are a few other points I would add.

Cost of tablets: I have noticed that some commenters have suggested that e-textbooks should be given away for free, to sell more iPad or tablets – but at the same time complain about the cost of tablets and insist that Apple and other companies give serious discounts to schools. One tablet is good for as many textbooks as a student needs, through all their years of college. All in all, given the presumably lower costs of e-books in any form, a tablet, even at full price, is a perfectly reasonable investment for a college student who is paying a total of hundreds of thousands of dollars for a college education.

Heavy lifting by students: When I was in school, from junior high on, I was always stuck carrying a heavy bookbag filled with textbooks to and from school. Schlepping all these books – where I might need only a few pages from any one of them at a given time – is an ugly memory. An iPad with all my textbooks on it? Sign me up, now!

Creationism and other intellectual idiocies: One of the worst problems faced by our public schools is the distorting impact of school boards in a few large states (e.g. Texas or California) on the national textbook scene. This plays out most prominently on the issue of evolution, where Texas state school board has had an extreme looney majority that doesn’t accept evolution and insists on giving “Intelligent Design” at least equal time in the classroom. Traditional book publishers can’t afford to develop, print and ship different versions of their book for each state, so school textbooks across the country kowtow to the lowest intellectual common denominator.

With e-textbooks, the tyranny of the right wing loonies would be broken. It would be a simple matter for different districts to choose what they wanted – and publishers could assure that all students, even those in the most demented parts of the bible belt, could have links to the full text on evolution, American history, black and minority history, the real story of our founders and deism, etc.

I still read printed books. But I know that the future of books is ebooks. And the future of textbooks is e-textbooks, for even more reasons.

Peter A. Hempel, Ph.D.