University of Texas to try digital textbooks
I am happy to hear that one of the major universities in my home state is going to get on the ebook bandwagon. The University of Texas will begin a test using digital ebooks in place of those expensive dead-tree versions. Students will pay $25 - $40 for the digital versions and download them to their computers for use. There are so many advantages to going ebook for universities that students should be jumping for joy. This would be very useful for those students lucky enough to be using a Tablet PC. You could write notes right on the textbook pages. All of the textbook information should be searchable too. Yowza!
(via Ars Tecnica)
Goodness I wish I’d had digital textbooks when I was in school! Its hard to say if the price or the ability to find what you’re looking for without reading an 80 page chapter make me more jealous of the students at University of Texas… either way they certainly have it good now!
However from a teacher’s perspective its already hard enough to keep your course from slipping into the easy A category. With information and maybe even power point slides from notes on the class website lecture attendance suffers. With the addition of digital textbooks students may never have to commit anything to long term memory again!
Posted by: LadyVoIP | October 7, 2008 at 9:10 am
You know they will be in some POS DRM format that will just piss people off and ruin any movement to go digital.
Posted by: Steven M. | October 7, 2008 at 9:51 pm
I might have actually bought text books during college if we had this.
…no, i probably still wouldn’t have.
Posted by: Ben | October 8, 2008 at 1:37 am
I should have heard about this given that it is taking place in my own backyard (Austin of course). This is great news for the environment & hopefully it will save some students some cash on text books too.
Posted by: Brian Kirk | October 14, 2008 at 9:23 pm