Paper, Please

Given the big push towards e-books where I work, I was interested to read some stories linked in a post at Stephen's Lighthouse suggesting that students (at least undergraduates--the posts don't specifically address medical, dental or public health students) don't actually like them very much.

It seems that they're too hard to take notes in (I can see that--I never wrote in my textbooks, but I know a lot of people like to annotate and find it helpful for learning), bookmark, and just generally refer to as one likes to refer to textbooks in the course of a class.

But they're so very space-save-y! And time-save-y since you don't have to physically come in and find them or check them out! Come on, students, you know you love them.

Love them! Love them as much as we do!

Actually, we ourselves feel a range of complex emotions regarding e-books. But this isn't about us.

It's about you, students, and whether or not you're actually going to use these things, so that we'll know whether or not we should keep on buying them for you.

So, in fact, it is about us, and our ever-tightening budgets.

Speaking from my workplace, we're hoping to get some better usage statistics in future, as the collection skews more electronic, to help us decide whether or not it's really the way to go. From talking to students, I get the impression that they sort of like the idea of having lots of textbooks available online, but I'm not sure they actually use them all that often.

One major hold-up, obviously, is that we need to get the right books online. Our students seem to tend (as most students, I expect) to read what they need to read for class, or what they're looking at for a specific project, and if something's not assigned, odds are it's not going to get a whole lot of use.

And if the text that's assigned in a class isn't available online, or is available only for individual rather than institutional use, then that's one class whose members are not going to enjoy the convenience of e-books, however much we enthuse about them.

We're sort of assuming that eventually everything will be available as an e-book, but that's some years down the line. If it develops that students genuinely dislike e-books, it may be even more years down the line than anticipated. (Although at some point if schools start saying "look, this is the only format we have, so like it or lump it, you fresh-faced dinosaurs," what are students really going to do? Not that I'm advocating this, given the range of complex emotions I myself feel with regard to e-books.)

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