Monterey College of Law is distributing Apple iPads to all students enrolled in a supplemental curriculum program that helps them prepare for the state's bar exam.
The program is motivated by the desire to save time for busy night students who typically work full time and have families, not cost. However, technology improvement coupled with new business models will eventually drive the cost of electronic textbooks well below that of printed textbooks, as shown in this cost breakdown.
Electronic book sales have already passed hard cover sales at Amazon, and the cost of a Kindle reader is down to $139.
In addition to cost and time savings, electronic textbooks will have new features including capability for social or collaborative reading. It is too soon to know what those features will be or how they will work, but check the Institute of the Future of the Book if you are curious about the possibilities.
Would you prefer electronic to printed textbooks?
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Electronic text books
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“Electronic book sales have already passed hard cover sales at Amazon, and the cost of a Kindle reader is down to $139” This got me thinking that if we all buy electronic books there will be more businesses wanting to have ebooks and readers to sale. Making them compete and lowering their prices so that people will want to buy from them. Making us save a lot of money in text books. This is going to be the future of how every single individual will buy and read their books. This has a lot of benefits not only the reduce of time and cost but the reduce of space and the protection of the environment (less trees beeing cut). We don’t have to be carring our heavy books all day long to school and in have more space in our house. There can be more trees and the environment can be a little better for us.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Larry Press: Do think that more schools should encourage their students to buy ebooks?
> Do think that more schools should encourage their students to buy ebooks?
ReplyDeleteI think we will see new formats, not just reproductions of current textbooks in electronic form. For example, I am trying to develop a series of independent modules that can be flexibly combined.
There are many experiments going on, and it is way too early for me to predict sorts of electronic teaching material and devices will catch on in the future. (Check http://www.khanacademy.org/ for a neat example of a non-textbook).
CSUDH has an initiative to encourage faculty to create and adopt electronic teaching material:
http://library.csudh.edu/ALS/
I think that having electronic books is the way of the futher. i believe that this could be a good tool that will be useful to college students and professors alike. for example, this technology will decrease the number of trees being cut down, it also will reduce those heavy bag packs and the work load will be easier to retrived then the traditional text book. In addition, according to the original post the program is motivated by the student who typically work full time and have families, not cost. which i believed is good way for busines professional to save time and money.
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