December 1, 1998
Textbooks Shifting From Printed Page to Screen
By ETHAN BRONNER
At Virginia Commonwealth University, sociology students use a "textbook"
that exists only online. It sends them to related Web sites, has recorded
lectures that they can rewind and offers discussion areas that supplement
and enliven their classroom discussions.
At Kent State University next spring, a few dozen students will receive
devices called electronic books, loaded with course texts. They will read
the works directly from what look like latter-day Etch-a-Sketches.
And in Texas, the State Board of Education is planning a pilot program to
distribute electronic books and laptop computers next fall to thousands of
high school students for use in place of textbooks.
With futurologists having mistakenly predicted the end of the printed page
for several decades now, no one is preparing a eulogy for the traditional
book. Television did not doom radio, video did not kill film, and
electronic publishing will not likely end print.
But with two electronic book devices on the market and an exponential
increase in reference and scholarly material available online, many experts
say that the shift from page to screen, once a Jetson-like fantasy, is now
approaching reality.
And there are those, like Jeff Rothenberg, a senior computer scientist at
the Rand Corporation, who say they can see the day when bound books printed
on paper will be viewed "more as objets d'art than things we use all the
time."
Valerie Raymond, an editor at McGraw-Hill, said: "I am a book person and I
never believed I would want to give up the books I carry around with me.
But I'm starting to think of myself more as a content provider. I look at
my 11-year-old son's school backpack, which I worry is ruining his spine,
and I can see advantages to electronic books. We know we are standing on
the edge of a precipice."
The notion that a shift is imminent comes because of several parallel
developments.
First, electronic book technology is advancing rapidly, with better screen
resolution and longer battery life. The cost of such devices is dropping;
two kinds of electronic books are on the market for $300 to $500 each, and
another, for $1,000 to $1,500, is due early next year. All of them allow
downloading of whole books from the Internet into their memories,
permitting students to carry many books in one lightweight device. The
devices allow word searches and have built-in dictionary functions.
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Electronic books are part of an increase in reference and scholarly
material available online.
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Second, the amount of material available for downloading is now enormous.
And third, a generation is coming of age for whom absorbing digital
information seems easy and natural. Even if not many young people seem
ready to curl up with a hand-held screen for reading a novel, the idea of
reading textbook or reference material from screens is increasingly common.
"Ten years ago, anything electronic was exotic," said Paul Saffo, a
director at the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif. "Today,
computers are an integral part of higher education. You can see where
electronic books would fit into the shape of academic life. I see this as a
key time for this technology, probably still one of interesting failures
but ones we can really learn from."
One important change in the last few years is the growing use of the
Internet for reference works. Texts for physicians, lawyers and other
professionals are being put online, where they can be updated with greater
ease and at lower cost than with printed texts.
In addition, a growing number of textbooks have online supplements for
graphics, pictures and, increasingly, video and audio supplements. Some
think it will not be long before the entire books are transferred into
digital format.
John Wiley & Sons, which publishes many texts for professionals in
technical fields, says that in the coming months two of its standard
reference works -- the Kirk-Othmer Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology, and
the Wiley Encyclopedia of Electrical and Electronics Engineering -- will be
available online.
Like most other reference works on the Internet, those books will be
accessible for a fee. That is also the case with an Internet publishing
site called Online Originals, which publishes original works of fiction
that can be bought online for $7 each.
There is also a small trend toward placing texts on the Web that are free,
with the publishers relying on contributions or advertising for revenue.
The Gutenberg Project, for example, has placed thousands of classics online.
And Emedicine.com offers, at no charge, a new encyclopedia for
emergency-room physicians that was written by 400 doctors. Members of the
military in far-flung places and a missionary in Haiti are among those who
have told the organizers, Dr. Scott Plantz, a research director at the
Chicago Medical School, and Dr. Jonathan N. Adler of Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston, that they found the site helpful. The site has been
financed primarily by Dr. Plantz and Dr. Adler, who hope that advertising
by drug companies will ultimately allow the site to pay for itself.
"We have up to 400,000 hits a day," Dr. Plantz said. "A big advantage is
that we will be able to update it constantly and embed in it new pictures
and even video clips. Our book is two-and-a-half times bigger than any
textbook in the field ever published. And a typical textbook is $200."
The market for educational texts was more than $5.5 billion last year, and
the Internet has only expanded that market, which has grown more than 8
percent so far in 1998.
And if textbooks really do move further, from the printed page into the
digital realm, the potential for profits is likely to be greater still,
because that change could reduce the need for warehouses, trucks, returns
and, even more significant, the used-book market.
Lynn D. Nelson, a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth who wrote an
online textbook that he now uses, said he found much more "active learning"
from his online book than from customary books.
"I have two classes right now, and they are both using the Web
intensively," Professor Nelson said. "One class has 300 students, and the
other has 40. In the large class, the students each write 12 essays and
pose questions to each other on the Web. They interact with each other
every week, and they can do it on their own time. The level of their
activity is inconceivable in a normal class. I see a big difference from
before this technology was introduced."
At Kent State, Roger Fidler, director of the information design laboratory,
said he planned to test two kinds of electronic books in classes next
spring and fall. The hand-held devices, which weigh 3 to 5 pounds, can
store 10 to 15 books downloaded from the Internet. He plans to give half of
each class the new devices and the other half the usual textbooks.
In Japan, Fidler says, a company is developing a kind of A.T.M. for train
stations, which will distribute digital magazines that a customer could
download onto a cassette and then install on a hand-held device for
reading. That could prove to be a model for magazines and newspapers in the
United States, he said.
Ira H. Fuchs, vice president for computing and information technology at
Princeton University, said the key for the future of electronic books was
increased screen clarity and lower prices.
"People say they love bookstores, but they are buying from Amazon.com," he
said. "Give them convenience, and the next thing you know you will be
telling your grandchild about this thing you once had called a book."
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