EDES 541 April 12, 2010 Cecile McVittie

The E-Textbook and Secondary School Libraries: Evolution or Revolution?

2 When news pundits look back at the most important technological breakthrough of 2010, the story of the year will be the arrival of slates/advanced e-book readers. For education, the news story that is quietly building is the spread of e-textbooks. Electronic textbooks have been around since the 1970s. One attempted introduction in secondary classrooms occurred Florida during the year 2000 with limited success, mostly due to reluctance from publishers to involve themselves in a market that was in its infancy. Since then, publishers have begun slowly moving into the university and college market on the strength of powerful laptop computers and other portable web-connected devices. Now that perpetually connected university students have begun to see some value in this format, e-textbook publishers, with their promises of reduced costs and environmental protection will soon begin to target the secondary school market. School boards desperate to cut their deficits and engage the new generation of wired learners will seek ways to minimize the significant expense of textbook purchases to support core curricula. It is easy to get caught up in the comparisons of the various devices and whether platforms are universal or not. In time, as with our current computer technology, standards for both devices and platforms will emerge. Teacher librarians can ensure a place at the forefront of this electronic information wave by becoming familiar with the problems, issues and creative possibilities for students and teaching staff. As literacy leaders and proponents of 21st Century learning, teacher librarians must begin the task of analyzing research and seeking opportunities to determine the strengths and weaknesses of e-textbooks. The next, great thing may prove to be very difficult to implement if students cannot easily access electronic resources. Lack of affordable, portable technology to allow for reading in any setting may prove to be the major stumbling block to e-textbooks in secondary schools. The cost of e-book readers remains in the range of a cheap laptop computer, but with less features. The various manufacturers of e-book readers are just beginning to settle on a universal publishing platform, so that books can be sold and used on any device. University students provide laptops and portable readers at their own cost, but secondary schools must provide for universal accessibility to ensure provincial legal requirements for public education are met. Until the costs related to portable reading systems are significantly reduced, it is

3 unlikely that e-textbooks will move into the secondary system in a significant way, simply because current textbook costs can be spread over a 10 to 15 year period of usage. Currently, most secondary students are discouraged from marking textbooks with margin notes and highlighting, yet this is a common method for interacting with textbooks at the university level. Some current e-book readers on the market are currently set up for easy user interactivity with the text, but this isnt a feature found on the less expensive models. While the lack of multiple application capability in most e-book readers can be seen as a way of reducing distractions for students, note-taking on the same device on which you are reading text would be very helpful as a way of reducing the number of devices students carry around at a given time. An example of student reluctance to embrace this technology was reported in the blog, Good E-Reader. When 50 students at Princeton University were given Kindle readers to use for their course reading, few students were found using them by the end of two weeks. The blogger comments that junior high school and high school students, who are encouraged to not to mark-up text and who are used to learning without resorting to marking up their texts can still benefit a lot from the current lot of Kindle. (Mandal, 2010) Kindle devices however, retail in Canada for approximately $400. It remains to be seen if families feel they can afford that much for a single use device. For school boards who have been through the years of rapidly changing technological devices, it is not likely to be a high priority purchase until some level of market stability and broad level usage has occurred. At this time, laptops will remain the e-book or e-textbook reader of most frequent use. While reading devices are the tools that generate excitement, the underpinning that determines success of digital tools is bandwidth to support connectivity. If an e-textbook is downloaded onto a device that does not require wireless access, then the amount of broadband access in a school does not matter. If the devices do require connection for optimal functions, then school districts and individual schools require a significant level of broadband access to ensure speedy access and downloading of information. Fortunately, both the United States and Canadian governments have a commitment to work towards high speed access for all areas of both nations. Most school districts and

4 regions in the southern part of Canada currently have access and some projections currently place up to 70% of homes as having a high speed connection. (Waverman and Dasgupta, 2010) Reading of e-textbooks across various devices is closer to becoming a reality as the industry begins to move towards EPUB, which is the standard used by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It is an open source digital program, which makes it easily usable and adaptable and allows for free e-book or textbook creation. Another digital tool that is becoming standard for viewing multimedia (and therefore any interactive, instructional video embedded in e-textbooks) is Adobe Flash Player. Devices used in schools will likely need to ensure that this is part of the programming package. This presupposes that e-textbooks will likely have instructional video files embedded as part of information. Where teacher librarians will likely be of greatest support to students and staff will be in working with a new information format. Teaching the reading of the e-textbook page will be similar to instructing students in how to read non-fiction, but will have the added features of videos, audio clips of various types, and other means of interacting with text to enhance learning and create meaning. If this sounds eerily familiar to the job we are already doing, it is. Problems that currently exist, like lack of pagination, will probably disappear, as small children are still introduced to print with picture books with pages and then move into larger books which also have page numbers. E-book producers of any kind who ignore setting up pages for quick referral will likely find themselves by-passed by the e-textbook for which a teacher can say, Now, everyone turn to page 67. Students at the secondary level, though, still need discrete instruction in how to navigate various kinds of text. An e-textbook will probably require a new way of looking at a page, more similar to reading a web-page than a traditional textbook. If students are still coming to the library for a quiet place to read and study, teacher librarians will still have a tutorial role, for students and a professional development role for staff to assist in getting the most benefit from the page in front of the reader.

5 When the students at Florida High School received e-textbooks in the fall of 2000, the etextbook publishers at the time were concerned about the Napsterization of textbooks. Today, sites exist where college textbooks can be downloaded for free in Person to Person (P2P). Digital content is difficult to contain, which is why some manufacturers of digital readers work hard to create proprietary formats which discourage the sharing of files. Publishers of e-books and e-textbooks are rapidly going to discover, like the music industry, that while profits from initial textbook sales will decrease, it is the peripheral sales that make up for lost profit. An example of this is an application created by Pearson Publishing for the iPod touch as a supplemental product for its high school math textbook series. The app calls up supplemental problems similar to the problems in the textbook. At the bottom of each problem is a show me button, which links to a video tutorial for solving the problem. Excellent textbook publishers will not only have links to useful supplemental applications, they will also allow for creative content addition to their textbooks. Currently, streaming video services allow for uploading of digital content to supplement lessons created by teachers for sharing within the companys network of users. Ownership of that material becomes the companys, so teachers and students must be aware of how their work is being used and what creative ownership rights they may be giving away. If textbook publishers use a similar model and with the existence of P2P sites where textbooks are uploaded, the role for educating students and staff about copyright and intellectual property will continue to be part of the teacher librarians role. R. David Lankes is absolutely right when he talks about the future of e-books, including e-textbooks: Digital rights management (DRM) and pricing schemes dont worry me. These are mostly imposed by the publishers, and we saw how this played out in music with the market eventually lowering prices and pulling back on DRM. Eventually, this will sort itself out. Where e-textbooks will fit in our collections is slightly more complex, but should follow the pattern already set for textbooks. If textbooks are already handled as a separate, but linked part of our automation systems, then this would seem to be a natural placement for the digitized versions. Downloads of e-textbooks would simply be part of the start-up procedures of the school year or semester. For library systems where single copies of textbooks are held as part of the library collection, a temporary loan may be possible depending on the digital rights agreement in place with the publisher. Other

6 options might include printing of short sections that are needed, as currently happens in some universities. Until schools have a chance to talk with publishers and teacher librarians have the opportunity to have some input, collection management issues are simply theoretical, though. Our job will continue to be to push the envelope of reading, creating and responding to the literature of fiction and information. Where the evolution of the e-book and particularly the e-textbook will go is a little hard to predict, but it will be interesting and our students will embrace it whole-heartedly, if it allows them to create meaning in intuitive, social ways. If libraries are about knowledge and facilitation, not artifacts and stuff, (Lankes, 2010) our jobs arent in jeopardy, theyre about to get even more exciting.

7 Citations

Lankes, R.D. (2010, April 01). Ereaders, the iPad - is that all there is? School Library Journal, Retrieved from http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/tocarchive/2010/20100401.html Mandal, S. (2010, March 17). Kindle to replace textbooks in schools? Good E- Reader. Retrieved April 7, 2010, from http://goodereader.com/blog/electronicreaders/kindle-to-replace-textbooks-in-schools/ Minkel, W. (2000, September). The e-books are coming. School Library Journal, 46(9), 2. Noorhidawati, A., & Gibb, F. (2008, December). How students use e-books - reading or referring? Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science, 13(2), 1-14. Spring, T. (2010, March). E-book piracy: is your download illegal? PC World, 28(3), 2325. Srinivasan, S. (2010, March 17). E-textbooks transforming the publishing industry. Before it's news. Retrieved April 7, 2010, from http://beforeitsnews.com/news/25488/ETextbooks_Transforming_Publishing_Industry.html Waverman, L., & Dasgupti, K. (2010, March 5). Canada and broadband: when behind is actually ahead. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved April 1, 2010, from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/canada-and-broadband-whenbehind-is-actually-ahead/article1491778/ Young, J. N. (2009, November). This could be the year of the e-textbook. Journal of Higher Education, 56(3), A1 - A12.