TOC 2011: Students and Faculty Not Ready for Etextbooks, Says Panel   

The transition to digital textbooks has a rocky road ahead, if Tuesday's panel at the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference this week in New York City was any indication. Students are not yet adopting etextbooks in large numbers, the panel concluded, and significant barriers remain, including faculty support, infrastructure issues, and an unfamiliarity with the new methods of study required by digital texts.

The panel, "eTextbooks in Higher Education: Practical Findings to Guide the Industry," started with a few basic stats: currently, only 15% of textbooks are available in digital format, noted moderator Jade Roth, VP, Books and Digital Strategy for Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, and those account for only 1-3% of higher education sales. Then, faculty and student reps on the panel identified the issues publishers must address before digital textbooks can catch on.

Susan Stites-Doe, a professor in the department of business administration and economics at the College of Brockport, currently uses digital texts for two classes, though the experiment has not been without its difficulties.

"It was extremely difficult for students to download and use the textbooks reliably," she said. Simple technical issues abound, and she doesn't have the time to troubleshoot students' problems at the same time as she is adjusting her own lessons. Complex Digital Rights Management (DRM) restrictions also further frustrate her student users, driving them to "work harder to break DRM than they ever will to study."

In terms of infrastructure and support, Nick Francesco, Manager of Technical Services for the Saunders College of Business at the Rochester Institute of Technology, said digital texts can further stress the already overtaxed communications networks at many schools. In larger classrooms, wireless access points are already saturated by regular laptop and mobile phone use, while ereading devices and links to digital textbooks stand to add additional traffic on top of that.

Francesco later told LJAN he appreciates that libraries on his campus lend ereaders with texts preloaded, but that a more flexible approach would better serve student and faculty needs. "[It would be] better for everyone to be able to put materials on any device anywhere," he said. "That's the ultimate—that's what people want." He acknowledged, however, that libraries have a difficult role mediating among the sometimes competing desires of students, librarians, and publishers. The standard for broad and relatively unfettered access to ejournal articles would be a good model for publishers and libraries to emulate, Francesco said.

Even putting aside technical impediments, there is some doubt as to the efficacy of digital texts over their print counterparts. Roth asked what she called the "million dollar question": are digital textbooks changing the way people learn for the better?

Jacob Robinson, a senior at Texas A&M University, said that the convenience made for more sustained engagement. He certainly doesn't carry his textbook everywhere, "but I will carry my phone, iPad, laptop," or other device; when he has a bit of downtime, he can easily refer back to a passage or section and mull it over..

But, he noted, while students are generally tech savvy, it's a myth to think that they adapt to every new format and technology without a period of adjustment. "You grow up learning from a [print] textbook," he said. "The transition will take a while."

Francesco concurred, adding, "we don't know how to e-study." There are many subtle elements to studying with a fixed text, including visual memory of layouts as well as highlights and annotations that are like mental landmarks for later recall of the material.

"We don't know yet how to do it [engage with digital texts] as e-learners, and you don't know how to do it as e-publishers," he said.