E-textbooks....Good or Bad

Our assignment this week was to read a variety of blogs and choose one or two postings that caught our eye and discuss the issues. After looking at all the blogs, I have to say two blogs written by Nicholas Carr were very interesting. His blog about Zero Tolerance for Print and E-Textbooks Flunk an Early Test were both thought-provoking and compelling. The first blog post made me wonder why in the world politicians would outlaw printed material. I really can not understand that at all. The post made excellent comments stating that we definitely are a long way away from learning what is gained or lost from the printed word. The ultimate goal of any school is to satisfy the needs of their patrons and I would say the same is true for any library. I will have to look at this politician's reasoning in depth to get a better grasp of his thinking or should I say lack of thinking concerning outlawing printed material!


The second post was even more interesting because the library I work in has been discussing the use of E-Readers and has finally set up a pilot project with some of the students. I work in an academic graduate level library, and have for many years. Our student body consists of military officers, civilians from government agencies and also a large volume of international officers. A diverse group indeed! There has been much discuss at this college and especially the library concerning E-readers and issuing the readings to our students using this type of technology. In fact our continuing education department has been testing this type of technology for the last two years or so using iPads. This year in fact we set up a pilot project to give iPads to students in 5 seminars. That is about half of our student body. The iPads contained all their readings for the semester. On an average our graduate students are required to read about 400 pages a week.


Since our school year is almost over we recently received the survey results back. I have to say it is a mixed bag so to speak. Most of the students love the ease of using the iPads, not having to carry around dozens of books. However, there were some problems that did arise. It is funny because a few of them were mentioned in Nicholas Carr's blog. The biggest problem that most of our students mentioned was the difficulty in relocating pertinent info. Our students are required to do a major research paper of about 50 pages, and this was one big problem for their research. I believe this is the "cognitive map" problem that Carr refers to. Another problem had to do with the color illustrations, however that maybe just a technological problem. Overall the students did like the iPads and would recommend them to be used in the future. Our college is looking at all the results and will hopefully make a decision within the next few weeks as to the future of iPads.


As I said before I have worked in this library for many years. I have seen many students carry dozens of books, for their required readings. I am afraid that is a thing of the past....I am still not sure if that is a good thing or bad thing.