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Printer-Friendly ModeElectronic textbooks not a hot seller yet
October 26, 2009 —
SVSU’s bookstore sells electronic alternatives to textbooks — but their popularity has yet to spike.
“Awareness of the technology is slowly starting to grow,” said Jade Roth, vice president of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers.
“There is still an uncertainty among students about whether to make the switch.”
Last winter, the campus bookstore offered 117 electronic textbooks (which are downloaded online), and five units were sold.
At the start of the fall semester, the numbers had grown to 160 titles and 16 units were sold.
Right now, the titles with the biggest demand have a digital doppelgänger. As more students adopt the e-book format, more titles will become available.
“Textbooks are following the natural evolution of going online, just like music and TV,” Roth said.
Digital textbooks have their advantages: they’re cheaper, searchable and virtually weightless.
“Students get upfront savings with the e-books,” Roth said. A digital textbooks usually costs 30 to 40 percent less than a copy off the shelf.
At SVSU’s bookstore, for example, a new copy of the kinesiology textbook Human Motor Development (McGraw-HIll, 2007) costs $127.40. The electronic form runs at $89.18.
If an electronic version is available, a card can be found next to the textbooks. The card contains a code to access the file online, and another will be needed from the receipt.
The process isn’t an electronic rental. “Most books at SVSU have no time limits on them,” Roth said. But while a brand new print book can later be sold back for cash, the electronic version comes nonreturnable.
Barnes & Noble uses a company called VitalSource Technologies to send their books to the screen. Once there, texts can be downloaded straight from Digital Text Books into VitalSource’s free e-book reader program, “Bookshelf.” The user will never need the Internet to access it.
Bookshelf contains all the books a user has downloaded and offers features such as highlighting, notetaking and inter-file linking.
To highlight, the user just has to drag the cursor over the text and then hit the highlight button. Users can change the color, the title and share their highlights with other users.
To take notes, a user drags the cursor over text, hits the “Make Note” button and adds their thoughts, and an icon will appear next to the text. To see the notes, a click on the icon will open them up. Bookshelf allows users to back up their notes and save them to their computers.
Users can also make folders that link to outside sources, including PowerPoint presentations and Web sites.
A Bookshelf textbook can only be accessed from one computer after it’s downloaded, which would work for students who use laptops.
Users wouldn’t need to buy any separate reader device, like Amazon. com’s $259 Kindle or Barnes & Noble’s upcoming identically priced Nook. But they can print book pages to take for reading on the go.
At this point, it’s still uncertain where the student market will lead the future of publishing.
“Some people like the new format,” Roth said, “while others are unsure.”
Whatever their opinion, she said one thing is certain: “It’s a new learning experience.”