e-textbook use among college students
Posted May 14, 2009 · by David · in classroom IT
I attended a presentation yesterday, one of the UNC Scholary Communications Working Group brown-bag lunch series, about e-textbook adoption by professors and students. Bob Henshaw from IT and John Jones from Student Stores studied a dozen classes in which e-textbooks were offered as an option alongside traditional textbooks. At UNC, professors choose not only the textbooks for their classes but whether the e-book version is an acceptable substitute; if they permit the e-version, students can choose the version they want. (We’re not talking about open textbooks or web-based textbooks; these are all produced by textbook publishers.) Few students (less than 10 percent) chose them, and some who did actually went back to the store and bought a print copy. Here are several reasons:
- Cost. A student who buys a $100 textbook new can sell it back to Student Stores for $50, where it’s sold used for $75. An e-textbook costs $50, so the cheapest option for the student is to buy a used print copy and sell it back. (Interestingly, the biggest reason textbooks are so expensive is the huge market in used books — a positive feedback loop that keeps driving up costs.)
- You can’t keep an e-book — electronic textbooks expire after 180 or 360 days.
- Difficulty of use. E-textbooks are nearly always just print textbooks put onto a screen, with the same layout, which makes them difficult to read (that was my point, not theirs).
- Electronic versions do not always have all the same content as print textbooks, and publishers don’t make this clear. A professor considering allowing the e-book has to read through both versions carefully to make sure they’re the same.
Despite all this, everybody in the room — half of them were from UNC Press, it seemed — thought that the major impediment to wider adoption of e-textbooks was cultural. The assumption remains that electronic text is the inevitable future of reading. This kind of prediction often produces its own feedback loop — the more people hear it, the more they repeat it, believe it, and eventually give into it. But it can also be self-preventing — if people assume it’s inevitable, they don’t bother actually taking steps toward it, and then it never happens. The latter is what I see happening with these e-textbooks. Publishers figure it’s the wave of the future, and they want to look like they’re moving in the “right direction,” so they publish electronic versions of their textbooks, but they can’t come up with a business model for publishing them, and they don’t bother designing them so they can actually be used. History is littered with inevitable things that never happened; this could turn out to be one more.
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David, you’re right that a lot of folks assume e-textbooks, and e-books in general, will take over just because they’re new and shiny. In my opinion, e-textbooks won’t catch on until consumers demand them.
I’ve heard a lot of folks point toward the music industry as an example of electronic media prevailing over older media-acquisition methods (in this case, going to the store and buying an album. Does anyone go to record stores anymore?). At first glance it seems logical that books would follow suit.
With music, though, the change didn’t come until music piracy destroyed record companies’ bottom line. Labels had to figure out a way to make money with digital music because if they didn’t, people would just download it for free.
As yet, this sort of consumer revolt hasn’t happened with books — no one in their right mind would type or even scan an entire book just to share it online — so what’s the incentive for publishers to make the switch? Why should they convert books into a format that makes them easier to steal when consumers seem more than happy (and in the case of textbooks, required) to buy printed books?
Consumers will demand a switch to digital books only when these books are 1) high-quality, and 2) free. If I’m going to spend big bucks for a textbook (and $50 is big bucks, even if the printed version costs twice as much), I may as well buy the printed version so I can mark it up and not go cross-eyed from staring at my monitor. That’s the main effect the digital music revolution has had on publishing, and electronic media in general — if it’s in an electronic format, I expect to get it for free.
Projects like Flat World Knowledge or our own NC History digital textbook have the potential to drive this shift, as they give people the content they want at no cost. If and when major publishers see a dent in their profits due to free electronic textbooks, only then will they shift to predominantly electronic books. Until then, they really don’t have much reason to.