eduPirate

The Future of Textbooks is Online [e-Textbooks]

Posted on 25. Mar, 2009 by Cap'n Ko in Education, Revolution, Technology

Traditional textbooks are heading for the gallows. They’re heavy, expensive, and difficult to update across the board. Sure, people will hang on because it’s “easier to read” or “feels good in their hands,” but that won’t last long. Digital and online textbooks are where the future’s heading, I guarantee it. Want to know why? Here’s what I see for our textbook future.

e-Reader Devices

Devices like Amazon’s Kindle are already doing this, and it’s only going to become more and more widespread. You can already purchase e-textbooks for the e-book readers, and they’re less expensive, they’re lighter, and it’s easy to highlight and bookmark pages. Just imagine, being able to carry all of your textbooks on one lightweight reader, instead of lugging everything around, messing up your back! The only thing that e-book readers tend to lack right now is color, which I’m sure will sort itself out in the future.

Updates

With traditional textbooks, there’s no way to update it without buying another copy. Textbook authors probably make a bundle off all the “editions” they put out there, forcing schools to buy new editions every few years, but with e-textbooks you could expedite the process, make it cheaper for students and schools, and even make small updates whenever you come across an error. It could all be automatic and easy, and you’d be able to cut out the middle-man, which is partly why they cost so much!

“Opening” Textbooks

With online, digital textbooks, there’s the possibility for people to contribute. Everyday folks, like you and me! People can add math problems, add their insights, find and mark errors, and more. From here, textbook users would be able to upload these to some sort of “cloud” and others could download more content for their e-learning book. Of course, there would need to be some kind of moderating processes, probably done by everyone, where there would be a “flag this” button. Content could be downloaded in “packs” too, to keep quality up. Giving people more control over their content, as well as letting people come up with their own supplementary content and share. We’ve already seen what Wikipedia has done, and something similar (though on a smaller scale) could happen with e-textbooks.

“Indie” Textbooks

With this, I think we’ll see a lot of individuals writing their own textbooks and either giving them out free or selling them on the web. I think these textbooks will be shorter, and written by experts in certain fields who are very passionate about the topics they’re writing about. They will probably be more specific to certain things (rather than Biology on a whole, it might be a short e-textbook on how DNA works), and thus higher quality all around. I think we’ll see schools using these Indie Textbooks more and more in the future, and we’ll be getting better educations because of it! I think there are a lot of creative teachers out there that have creative, innovative ways to teach people about their niche, and just don’t have any way to do it (outside their classroom).

Audio and Video

Something that traditional textbooks can’t do is incorporate multimedia into their pages. Perhaps we’ll see some of this in the near future when e-paper gets more popular, but honestly I see things moving towards computers and e-book readers before e-paper really takes hold.

Adobe just released a new version of Adobe Acrobat Pro (Thanks Kirsten!) which will allow you to insert video, audio, and even ads into your PDFs. Just imagine, you’ll be learning German. Every sentence will have something you can click on and you’ll be able to hear it read out to you. Perhaps there’s a picture of some animal’s behavior and you’re taking a biology class – just click on that image and it’ll start up a video for you so you can see exactly what it is they’re talking about. There’s so much potential here, it makes me so excited!

Ad Supported Textbooks

As I mentioned above, with textbooks that hook up to the net, you’ll be able to have ad-supported textbooks. I’m not sure if this is the best solution, but it could be a way from someone to make an e-textbook and distribute it around for free (and still make some money for the author).

Respond Right from your Textbook

With e-textbooks, theoretically it could be set up so that teachers could insert textboxes that students can fill out (essay questions, answering math problems, whatever) that get sent to a teacher’s e-mail, or even a spreadsheet. This saves some paper, organizes things automatically for the teacher, and allows a teacher to customize a textbook for their particular needs.

Websites Instead of Textbooks

If you think about it, websites are a lot like digital textbooks, which means anyone with a little bit of web knowledge (or very little) can start up a website and create an “online textbook” that incorporates all of the things I’ve listed above. I’ll personally be taking the PDF route, including audio and video (no ads though), but I’ve tried the website route before and think that PDF’s / e-books are the way to go (which you can advertise on your blog / website), though Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese is a good example of making a “website textbook” work well.

We definitely have a lot of potential in terms of revolutionizing the textbook business. Just like traditional education, textbook change needs to happen soon, and it can / will really help our children learn more (and save them from becoming hunchbacks).

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