Ebooks at Liberal Arts Colleges

"it's only a matter of time before, for example, a major publishing company sells textbooks through Amazon for use on the Fire and hooks in powerful interactive web applications for assessment, tutoring, or simulations, all on a little 7″ device that fits in any students backback."

U of Incarnate Word promotes free textbooks (mostly electronic) as benefit of online program

As a part of the RIS Incubation process, I've been evaluating a number of popular e-book readers to see how viable they might be for classroom and/or library use. The readers I examined are: Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle DX Sony Reader 300 Sony Reader 600 (aka Sony Reader Touch) Barnes and Noble Nook Apple iPad running Apple's iBooks software, Amazon's Kindle software, and Barnes and Noble's Reader software.

"Students spend an average of $900 a year on textbooks-20 percent of tuition at an average university and half of tuition at a community college. Textbook prices have increased at four times the rate of inflation since 1994 and continue to rise."

"Two universities running Kindle DX pilot programs have rejected the device as a potential textbook replacement, citing a poor feature set and the controversial accessibility issues. Primary among these is the text-to-speech capability."

"Students in these courses use the computer during class time to work through material at their own speed. Through diagnostics taken along the way, the program creates a "personalized learning path" that targets exactly what lessons they need to work on and then delivers the appropriate material. Points, badges and other game mechanics theoretically keep students chugging through courses with more motivation. In the meantime, teachers learn which students are struggling with exactly which concepts."

"This isn't the same approach, however, that Apple took to disrupting the music industry. This isn't the equivalent of $.99 download for songs. This is about hiring "great textbook writers," something I don't think Apple ever did for songwriters, other than a few "iTunes Exclusive Releases" perhaps. And it seems as though -- again, just based on this passage from the biography -- that Jobs' frustration with the industry isn't with the industry so much as the bureaucracy that goes into textbook certification and adoption. How would partnering with Pearson, the largest education publisher in the world, disrupt textbook publishing? Color me skeptical."

"Courseload offers an electronic version of any textbook on any computer for one-third the price of a traditional printed textbook."

"As the e-reader and tablet wars heat up, Amazon.com Inc. is launching a digital-book lending library that will be available only to owners of its Kindle and Kindle Fire devices who are also subscribers to its Amazon Prime program."

"Part of the answer lies in the fact that the books they need - textbooks at least - are not always available in digital format. Even if some titles are available, many students opt to buy all their books at the same time from the same location (whether that retailer is online or a traditional brick-and-mortar bookstore or a textbook rental company). As different e-readers and e-reader apps have access to different catalogs, there isn't really a seamless shopping experience for digital textbooks."

Raises concerns about proprietary system that focuses on getting you to buy Amazon content; lack of flexibility: "schools are going to have to look for digital content that is available across platform. That could mean looking for DRM-free resources, or at least for resources that aren't restricted to one particular platform or file format. That could mean turning to Web apps over native apps. Does that mean turning to one big media technology company to handle content delivery (whether it's Apple or Amazon or Pearson)? Man, I sure hope not."

"The earliest electronic textbooks simply offered the text of the printed book on a computer. Today's newest models, though, come with an array of features, including software tools that automatically grade homework for professors or let students share their margin notes with friends online."

2009-2010 Kindle tests

"Just one day after the ground-breaking announcement of the new Kindle lineup we got news from the long awaited 35 USD tablet from India."