News Briefs

E-Textbooks: The future is now?

Jan 17, 2008 11:53 AM

They’re the bane of school life. Teachers must stick to the textbook, while 90-pound kids trudge around with 30 pounds of dead weight as if they were in basic training. Now, two products — Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader Digital Book — could change that as digital content becomes mainstream, textbook prices soar and the new easy-to-carry technology lets you do things even the textbooks couldn’t do. Already, McGraw-Hill Education offers almost 95 percent of its textbooks as e-books, and interest is growing rapidly. Once the system is standard in colleges, expect elementary and secondary schools to follow.

There’s also CaféScribe — a downloadable service that offers an iTunes-like interface for browsing books combined with social networking features. These allow students to share notes online and easily annotate and highlight information in different colors. It also links to encyclopedia articles, allows word search and lets students collaborate in collecting notes and storing them in one place.

The company expects to have 15 publishers on board in the first quarter of 2008, including more content from Oxford University Press. Others are working on a Web-based repository for PDF-style versions of popular textbooks, while CourseSmart will sell six-month subscriptions to texts online for half the cost of a paper edition.

The downside: you can’t sell your textbooks back.

Inside Higher Education, Jan. 3