With all the hype about Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about what products like the Kindle and Sony’s Reader might mean for educators and students.
The possibility that tempts me most is the prospect of students being able to register for a class and then seamlessly download all the readings for their schedule–textbooks, secondary readings, articles placed on reserve, primary sources (images, texts, sounds, video), problem sets, etc., etc. At that moment, the student then has access to all of his or her course materials for the semester (including syllabi).
Imagine how much easier it would be to teach if each of your students had all of the course materials for the semester sitting right there on their desks in a small package like one of these e-book readers. The instructor could then quite easily go back to material from earlier in the semester, or jump ahead to something assigned for the end of the term, and students would have instant access to whatever you wanted them to see.
From the standpoint of the publishing industry, such a prospect has to be much more appealing than having all that material posted online, where it can be traded (for free) among the student population at large. The DRM feature of these readers means that copyright holders would thus be able to maintain a reasonable amount of control over their products. And, they could cut way back on printing and production, shipping and storage, of bulky books, especially textbooks.
I recently had a very interesting conversation with the president of a major textbook publishing house in which he asserted that the textbook was over as a profit center for their company and that they needed to figure out what they were going to be doing in 10 years when they weren’t publishing textbooks any more. The situation I’ve just described might be one way out of this looming crisis.
But I don’t think it’s going to work. At least not in the current configuration of these devices.
The single biggest obstacle to the scenario I’ve just described is that these devices are not Internet access devices. For teaching and learning to be truly transformed by e-book devices, students (and their instructors) will have to have real time access to the Internet with the same device.
Why? Because even in the happy circumstance where a student has all of his or her readings for the semester downloaded to an e-book reader, that small device on his or her desk represents a limited universe of information. With content literally exploding onto the Internet at a rate unimaginable just a couple of years ago, students and instructors will demand instant access to additional information.
Until that problem is solved, e-book readers really aren’t going to be very useful in the post-secondary classroom. A much better solution, would be to start developing laptops with screens that have the same text reproduction qualities as the readers and that are smaller than the current clunkers my students lug around. When students have a device the size of the current crop of readers that can do all the things that the readers do and can access online resources, then we’ll have something really useful.
Steve? Steve Jobs? Are you listening?
Maybe it’s my bibliophilia talking, but my concern with ebook readers and DRM is the question of what happens when a device inevitably dies, or if you change devices. What happens if you get a different brand, or want a newer model, or drop the thing in the toilet or bath? What happens if formats change – will I still be able to read content thirty years from now? This is important to me since I have at least a few books that are over a century old. I have to be cautious when reading them, but I can still read them.
All of these issues aside, I would love a device about a quarter inch thinner than my Macbook with a screen between the size of an HP tc1100 tablet and the average PDA – five inches by seven inches would be great.
Baen has a new feature that sometimes comes with their hardbound science fiction – a DVD containing electronic copies of the book and others similar to it. I love it – not only can I read the book itself while at home, but I can load the electronic copies on a laptop or PDA and travel with it. That’s exactly what I did during our move from Colorado to Alabama. All of our books were on a moving truck, but two weeks’ worth of reading material was safely ensconced in my laptop.
Hi Chris:
I too worry about these same issues and remain unconvinced that e-books are ever going to kill of books…at least in my lifetime (I’m planning on at least another 40 years). We discussed some of these issues in detail on our podcast last week.
Mills
I agree (with both of you). I think what we need is something that resembles a Tablet PC but is the size of the Kindle. It wouldn’t need all the bells and whistles of a true laptop (CD/DVD, etc.), but would allow touch-screen markup (giving the feel of annotating in the margins), and simple access to internet/e-mail. A basic set of speakers would be nice, but probably not necessary in most cases. Supporting PDF/PPT files would also be helpful for educators/students, as these seem to be two of the most commonly used in the classroom.
Matt, I think an expanded iPod Touch might be the ticket for that type of functionality since Apple opened it up to developers and released an SDK. Just add the appropriate e-book software.
Mills, I’ll check out the podcast after I finish my grading – only forty more exams to go before I’m free. I usually miss podcasts due to the environment I read blogs in – at the library at UA or at home in the living room.
I cannot and will not get friendly with a publishing platform that uses a DRM that is restricted to a specific platform. They need to create multi-platform readers, not invent a new format. That’s the problem with Zinio magazines (and textbooks) too. Why not use something tried and true like PDF, which can be password protected and be accessed on the Mac, Windows, Linux, and even some handheld devices.
And have you ever seen anything so ugly?