Random Ranting: Digital Textbooks, practical for college?
There’s been a lot of talk about moving to digital textbooks. In some classes - like my accounting class - the transition has already begun. The original textbook Accounting Principles is divided into the separate sections - since the accounting sequence is three classes - and each piece is sold separately for $50. Instead of a hefty ten pound textbook, we purchase packets of loose pages, and a separate binder to store them in. These cheap, flimsy ‘textbooks’ can’t be sold back to the bookstore, so the publisher is guaranteed to sell more copies than before, and they save a pretty penny on production costs. (The books are no cheaper for students, however; I have a sneaking suspicion that you end up paying more if you take the entire set of accounting classes.)
To compensate students for these crap textbooks, the publisher also included an access code to the company website. When combined with a teacher’s code, it allows students to access drill exercises, extra practice problems, and PowerPoint lecture notes. The funniest feature of the site is the offering of mp3s of chapter text so that, in the words of the publisher, you can listen to accounting principles while at the gym! (If I was lifting weights while listening to debits and credits, I’d probably drop the weights on my head and let them crush my skull to end the torment.) But I have to admit, for a student who is more of an audio learner, or someone who prefers hands-on activities, this ‘digital textbook’ is far more useful than traditional book learnin’.
But as I already mentioned, the loose pages of the paper textbook can’t be sold back to the bookstore at the end of the semester. They’re such a cheap paper and low quality that I don’t think they’d last more than a year or two on your shelves; my classmates have been accidentally ripping the pages out of their binders just turning the pages. Even more irritating is the fact that the on-line component, which is supposedly so valuable an improvement, only allows you access while you’re registered in a class. So if my instructor decides he doesn’t feel like using the on-line quizzes in his class, I don’t get to access the textbook that quarter. I can’t go back to previous sections to review what was learned in previous classes. I guess I have the cheap photocopy textbook for that, but it seems like the publisher’s starting to push towards eliminating even this sorry book and selling students the on-line code alone - no physical product.
Most of the people I know who struggled through college have a shelf somewhere in their house on which sits a stack of antiquated textbooks. They’re so old the information inside is useless, but the heavy books sit as a monument to the years spent poring over the pages in pursuit of higher learning. I guess I should be grateful for the trees going digital would save, but a nostalgic corner of my soul feels just a bit sad when I think about a world without paper textbooks.