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Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.  

A really big discontinuity has taken place.  One might even call it a "singularity"

Today’s students - K through college - represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology.

The Internet Archive’s Peter Brantley made a cogent and precise presentation at the American Library Association conference this week that urged the librarian community to do a better job of shaping the multitude of conversations that ultimately affect how and what libraries can do with digital content.

books in many ways are an afterthought for them

About 82 percent of Power Buyers (consumers who acquire e-books on a weekly basis) say they prefer e-books over print and nearly 70 percent of Non-Power Buyers say they now prefer e- over print.

If three-quarters of an undefined survey group likes paper but a majority of the actual customer base likes digital, what are the chances that most of that 75% don’t buy very many books in the first place?

500 American college students. Seventy-three percent of them said they would not be able to study without some form of technology, and 38% said that they could not even go more than 10 minutes without checking their laptop, smartphone, tablet or ereader.

70% of the students said they use keyboards rather than paper to take notes and 65% said they use digital devices to create presentations.

A 2010 study by OnCampus Research found that 74% of college students surveyed still preferred to use a printed textbook. But the CourseSmart survey suggests that further etextbook adoption might be on the way.Nearly half of the 98% of students in the survey who owned a digital device said they regularly read etextbooks. Sixty-three percent had read an etextbook on their device at least once, and the majority of the survey group agreed that etextbooks are easier to carry, simpler to search, cheaper and better than traditional textbooks for reading on-the-go.

Kelly paints a future where access to content is free and immediate, discovery of it is personalised and social, consumption of it is fragmented, and everything is interlinked.

eBook sales are down 13%, audiobooks are up 38%, colouring books are up 1,100% (!), and – according to most analysts – sales of regular books are back in the black. This wasn’t the world we expected. Your stuff may be easier to acquire (thanks to the cloud and Amazon Prime) and consume (thanks to smartphones, a reading category that’s grown by 7% this year), but the core product – the book – is no more shareable or fluid than it was when Wired Magazine first hit the shelves in 1993.

So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things: First, works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near-zero audience they usually have now. Far out in the "long tail" of the distribution curve — that extended place of low-to-no sales where most of the books in the world live — digital interlinking will lift the readership of almost any title, no matter how esoteric. Second, the universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilization is scanned and cross-linked. Third, the universal library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts — past and present, multilingual — on a particular subject, then you can have a clearer sense of what we as a civilization, a species, do know and don't know. The white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted, while the golden peaks of our knowledge are drawn with completeness. This degree of authority is only rarely achieved in scholarship today, but it will become routine.

once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves.

Once snippets, articles and pages of books become ubiquitous, shuffle-able and transferable, users will earn prestige and perhaps income for curating an excellent collection.

The initial e-book explosion is starting to look like an aberration. The technology's early adopters, a small but enthusiastic bunch, made the move to e-books quickly and in a concentrated period.

the shift from e-readers to tablets may also be dampening e-book purchases

The fact that an e-book can't be sold or given away after it's read also reduces the perceived value of the product.

the heaviest buyers of e-books are now buying more, not fewer, printed books

Clay Shirky

Not once in that half century has anyone successfully invented anything that feels like the digital version of a book. Books online, whether in a Kindle or Google Books, are always (cue McLuhan) the old medium populating the new.

« Ce qui importe ce n’est pas de lire, mais de relire » J-L Borgès

Comme l’a bien montré Alexandre Serres[1], cette logique adaptative, à fondement comportementaliste et à visée principalement économique, est manifeste dans un grand nombre de textes internationaux, notamment politiques, qui posent la nécessité d’enseigner cette « maîtrise » ou « culture de l’information » (Information Literacy) aux jeunes générations. Ainsi par exemple, en France, la « Loi d’orientation et de programme pour l’avenir de l’école » de 2005 intègre désormais au « socle commun » de connaissances et de compétences la « maîtrise des techniques usuelles de l’information et de la communication »[2].

Dans des études qu’il a menées sur les pratiques de lecture numérique, Alain Giffard[12] qualifie de « pré-lecture » l’acte de lire le plus couramment pratiqué lorsque l’on navigue sur le Web : la lecture y ressemble à une sorte de scannage, fait de repérage et de sélection, au mieux d’un pré-montage ; et il distingue cette forme de lecture numérique de la « lecture d’étude », classique, livresque et lettrée, telle qu’elle s’est constituée historiquement depuis le Moyen-Âge autour de l’objet-livre. Or, cette pré-lecture a précisément les caractéristiques du mode d’attention très réactif et volatil entrainé par la surexposition aux médias : elle se révèle réactive/instable, multidirectionnelle/superficielle. Ainsi Alain Giffard montre que le risque est grand que la « pré-lecture » numérique devienne la « lecture de référence » des prochaines générations de collégiens, qui font partie de ce que l’on appelle les « digital natives », ce qui pourrait rendre quasiment impossible l’enseignement et la pratique de la lecture lettrée : « Technique par défaut, risque de confusion entre pré-lecture et lecture, entre lecture d'information et lecture d'étude, entre les différentes attentions, place de la simulation, contexte d'autoformation, arrivée de la génération des "natifs du numérique" dont certains prennent la lecture numérique comme référence: tous ces éléments peuvent se combiner. Le risque est grand alors de ce que certains chercheurs anglais appellent "reading without literacy", une lecture sans savoir lire qui est la forme la plus menaçante d' " illettrisme électronique ". »

The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement.

The web is an assembly not of things but of shards, of snippets, of bits and pieces.

To move the words of a book onto the screen of a networked computer is to engineer a collision between two contradictory technological, and aesthetic, forces. Something's got to give. Either the web gains edges, or the book loses them.