A blog on the British Medical Journal Group Blog asks whether recent technologies will kill off medical textbooks on paper. The blogger, Harry Brown, takes the position that yes, they will indeed kill paper texts and probably in the not so distant future.
Me, I'm not so sure.
I absolutely believe that the iPad, Kindle DX, and lots of other technologies are changing the way people buy and use clinical content, and I LOVE it. These technologies offer many features that print-on-paper (POP) products simply can't.
Yet there's something about paper, something about holding a book, about writing in the margins and highlighting key passages that make traditional textbooks important learning tools. We've seen attempts at schools going all-electronic falter because the students found the devices (the Kindle DX at Syracuse University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison) too cumbersome, especially for bookmarking, highlighting, and taking notes.
Certainly the technologies will improve and e-books will find a place in education. Absolutely. Bet the farm on it.
But they will not universally replace books just as television didn't universally replace radio, the internet didn't universally replace TV, and so on.
These devices present another option for the user, and for some applications in education, they'll make perfect sense. For others, they'll fall far short.
Same with POP products. They just don't make sense for certain pedagogical applications anymore, which is one of the reasons why all of us textbook publishers are scrambling to provide electronic ancillaries, to supplement the books with what they can't do very well, things like interactivity, rapid searchability, that kind of thing.
That doesn't mean technology will kill textbooks, it just means that the way we develop and present textbooks, and the way we link them with technology, will change. It HAS to change, the market is demanding it.
And we'll do it, we'll change. Actually we already are, and we'll continue to adapt to the technologies and we'll continue to sell paper textbooks because they offer things e-books can't.
More on that to come…
I think Kindle can, iPad that is a bit hard.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the next iPad version will be much improved, don't you? Have you actually seen one yet?
ReplyDeleteI like the convenience of eBooks. One can still to print a chapter or a number of pages and add notes with some eBook versions. I confess I am one of those people who underlines, writes, bookmarks, & highlights in books. So basically, I find eBooks useful if I can also have a paper option.
ReplyDeleteMy wife and I both have Kindles and we LOVE them. I like the bookmark feature so I can go back and find passages I really liked. But I love paper books too. Guess I'm a bi-bookual!
ReplyDelete[...] February 5, 2010 Andy McPhee Leave a comment Go to comments In a post last week, “Will the iPad and Kindle Kill Traditional Textbooks?” I promised to address elements that traditional texts have that e-books don’t. First [...]
ReplyDeleteI once read a study on the purchasing habits of book consumers. Can you believe smell was listed as a factor? I am totally hooked on the instantaneous nature of e-books. I am writing from Maryland where we are experiencing the biggest snow storm in our state history, and have been buying e-books like crazy. That being said, I hope you are right and printed books stay around forever. The Kindle and iPad will have a hard time reproducing smell!
ReplyDeleteI think this is largely what we'll see going forward as well.
ReplyDeleteNever thought about the odor, but you're absolutely correct. I know that if I go into a bookstore and open a book with an odor I don't like, I don't buy the book. Thanks for the reminder!
ReplyDeletei like this gadget (ipad), many high tech features offering. Good...
ReplyDelete[...] Will the iPad and Kindle Kill Traditional Textbooks? January 2010 9 comments [...]
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