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> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks.

Yes, digital textbooks can offer so much more, and yet maybe the "so much more" is their biggest pitfall: they (and/or the device serving as their platform) offer near limitless opportunities for distraction. While our attention span - or our lack thereof, trained as we are by the 3 second rule TV commercials push on us - might be able to get a major workout that leaves us exhausted and feeling like we have accomplished something (though in reality, hardly anything) - the digital format and form of delivery can rob us of our ability to freely focus. Let's face it, even with a good old-fashioned hard cover we can encounter distractions, and when we use digital, we're opening ourselves up to overwhelming levels of "opportunities for distraction" in which environment the human mind/body/condition is incapable of flourishing. Ironically, the very limitations of the physical textbook may be one of its liberating features.

I think that argument is often made because it is easy to make. Just because one reads from a paper textbook means one is avoiding distractions? What about phones and their incessant alerts?

One way you can avoid distractions is to limit the features of the device. Pull internet access. The problem here is with the student more than the device. I tend to get distracted a lot when reading a digital textbook too. It takes effort, but also does not looking at your phone when you are reading a textbook.

One has the option of leaving the phone in a dorm room and going to the library.

> the problem here is with the student.

In all such things, we need to think about the combined student-device system, no? Especially since it is orders of magnitude cheaper and more straightforward to change the device than to change the student.

Still, I think it's easier to ignore a distraction on a phone, which you can easily put on silent vs. a computer where you're a click away from facebook.

The less effort that's required to focus, the better.

https://hbr.org/2017/10/in-a-distracted-world-solitude-is-a-...

That's a great point. The other day in a teacher parent conference a 30 year veteran elementary teacher told me that the "attention a pan" of kids was down to 5 minutes. After five minutes on a subject the kids would completely shut down. Every five minutes she has to completely switch gears - within the same subject and same topic - just to keep them entertained enough to not lose their focus. "Digital media have shredded their ability to focus."

I bet the kind of attention matters, ie. what matter is payed attention to. Keen observation anyhow.

> they offer near limitless opportunities

My daughter is in a book-free school where all textbooks are provided on an iPad and I can tell you that the vast majority are glorified PDF readers with an occasional video. They only just started to exploit any of the advantages the new medium offers.

> I think the big mistake one can do when comparing digital and physical textbooks is compare then one-on-one with a level playing field. Why do that?

> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises.

I absolutely agree. Moreover, there might be some situations where physical books might be BETTER and some situations where a digital textbook might be better.

When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources

> Open educational resources (OERs) are teaching, learning, and research resources that reside in the public domain or have been released under a copyright license that permits anyone to freely use and repurpose them. Open educational resources include full courses, course materials, modules, textbooks, streaming videos, tests, journal articles, and any other tools or materials used to support learning.

I am not saying CUNY's efforts are on the spot (I have no idea how far they've gotten so far tbh) but I think it is a step in the right direction http://www2.cuny.edu/libraries/open-educational-resources/

>When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise. The goal for the future should be open education resources such as open education resources

I have the exact same opinion. I commented right here on HN about the importance of these kinds of free resources. The CS community is leading with this, but I see other fields catching up with this too.

Edit: Found my comment[1](Google is amazingly powerful and scary). Check out the textbook to see what I'm talking about with the 'rich content' argument.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905438

> When it comes to textbooks, our effort should be focused on books that are unencumbered by copyright and other such malaise.

The cost of copyrighted textbook can be substantial, but they are usually dwarfed by the cost of the larger educational undertaking. Open access textbooks is a good goal, but I'm not sure I it as critical to improving education.

> The cost of copyrighted textbook can be substantial, but they are usually dwarfed by the cost of the larger educational undertaking. Open access textbooks is a good goal, but I'm not sure I it as critical to improving education.

I absolutely agree. We have to bring down the cost in higher education. I'd go as far as to say that for public institutions, we should considerably bring down the administrative cost which is not possible without removing a lot of the reporting requirement. We require our schools and colleges to do far more than just teach. There is no reason why public schools should compete against private, land grant schools by outspending on athletics and fancy dorms (no, please don't tell me these programs make more money than we put into it because it is NOT TRUE for all colleges as a whole). For public schools, it should be easy to calculate the median annual income of all teaching staff (tenured professors, non-tenured professors, associate professors, adjuncts, lecturers, graduate assistants, yada yada) and enforce that nobody not even the football coach makes more than twice that median. There are a lot of things we need to do to lower the cost, including some things that will make the unions mad at us and some things that will make the administration mad at us (basically we will make enemies all around if we want to do the right thing which is mostly why we can't do the right thing).

Above, I was just talking about books. Once we remove the "intellectual property" part out of the textbooks out of the equation, we can have very cheap books that anyone can print and we can more fairly assess the cost of print vs screen.

Definitely agree we should bring down the cost while keeping or improving academic standards, but your quick fixes are pretty naive. If all we needed to do was dock coach's salary to make a school affordable, or require open access text books, it would have been done long ago. Most professors aren't wealthy. Public schools are huge institutions, limiting their administrations power to set salaries or assign books can cause far more harm, hurt recruitment and quality. I don't have a quick fix, other than making much larger investments in education with public dollars.

Something I believe is that college tuition isn't high because maintaining a college is expensive due to the unnecessary expenditure you state. I think it is high so that the money can be used fund other, more important parts of the university.

One of the primary ways a college gets 'ranked', and thereby attracts better students is by research efforts of the university. Now research needs money, from equipment to paying post docs to retaining good professors. State universities get federal grants, but is that sufficient to compete against private universities that charge $40k+ each semester?

I think lack of research funding is the reason college tuition being so high. I also think driving down costs will only drive down the quality of education, since lower salaries mean less resources for research & sub-par profs (because they'll be at $TECH_COMPANY) -> lower ranking -> less 'good' students -> less research. And at some point you'd be stuck in the same situation as the public middle and secondary schools, where administration has to pinch pennies and reduce programs that benefit students.

Sounds messed up, but the only way out is more funding from the state if you want a cheap college education. Or just avoid the costs and get yourself an Internet Education.

Sorry, I'm very bad at explaining myself. I do want more money to go into education. My thought was of we pegged administrator pay to professor pay, we could offer a living wage* (or better?) to our (non tenure track) adjuncts and postgrads.

By the way, I sincerely doubt we can afford to match private sector pay. (Look at the military and see how much they stretch every dollar when it comes to salary). We don't have to match private sector pay. We just have to pay our teaching staff enough and not make their job too miserable. I mean where are you going to go off you want to do basic research?

As much as we hate to admit it, there is a lot of what I'd call waste. We have too many people in management making six figure salaries who act in their own self interest first. I sincerely believe there should be a pay cut for management (from the college president down to all management).

I love the idea of an Internet education too but I feel like there might be value to being there in person sometimes? I'm not sure what I'm talking about.

*https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777899

Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbook

There's no digital interface as fast or intuitive as sticking a finger in a page to flip back and forwards, or scribbling in a margin, or any of the other ways that people physically interact with books. Maybe there will be one day but reading a PDF on a screen doesn't even come close.

I hate buying text books in electronic form. I still more where or less to find the equations I am looking for in the 1300 odd page Gravitation by MTW, yet zooming back and forth in even a small pdf is an exercise in frustration.

What digital could offer is interaction. See Bret Victor: http://worrydream.com/ExplorableExplanations/

I strongly suspect the act of "self-visualisation" of a concept trumps being just shown it for developing true understanding.

The flexibility of having a computer read the text via text to speech is a huge benefit IMO. My reading speed is painfully slow but with espeak or a screen reader I can parse about 400 wpm.

One thing that helped me a lot was doing a keybinding for espeak via:

  xsel | espeak -v en-us -s 400

I have a relative with dyslexia and it was a helpful hack for him to get reading faster too. Too bad this doesn't usually work as well in school settings where they use physical textbooks.

For any Mac users wanting to try out text to speech and who didn't already know, it's built into OSX. Have a look in your Preferences panel.

It can be very useful if you want to 'read' something while looking at something else, like a game.

You might not know this, but you don't need to go through the Preferences panel. You can use the `say` command from the command line, which uses the same engine, but you can pipe text to it. For example, to dictate whatever's on the clipboard,

    pbpaste | say

> I'd like to see that study, and I bet digital books will blow everything out of the water.

I'm not so sure. Static, printed 2D paper isn't nearly so limiting as you'd think. The time dimension is one of the hardest ways to convey information, and often times it ends up being used merely as animation gap-filling while you're waiting for slow narration to catch up. Auditory information could help people who process it better than written information, but outside of some rather limited scenarios where specifically auditory knowledge is required (such as language learning), it's not really providing anything useful for other people. Interactivity too is overrated: its biggest utility is in allowing people to explore data, whereas the main goal of textbooks is to convey information [1], at which point a well-chosen static snapshot is sufficient to direct people to the important information.

The aspect of quizzing students and automatically grading is possibly beneficial, but it's really orthogonal to the question of digital or print textbooks. Indeed, textbook manufacturers already have embraced the online homework market, since a one-time-only key to access the site is an effective way to kill the used textbook market. But other than saving TAs the burden of grading assignments, it doesn't add much pedagogical value; the real pedagogical value would be in using such assessments to figure out what the student's internal memory map is and where it is going wrong, but that is not yet possible with our technology and I doubt it's on the cards anytime soon.

[1] One can argue that it's better to let users draw conclusions for themselves so as to challenge the author's viewpoint. But that's not the metric that's going to be selected for in textbooks, which is to measure retention of information, and it's probably going to be somewhat counterproductive of the desired metric.

>I'm not so sure. Static, printed 2D paper isn't nearly so limiting as you'd think.

The real benefits of e-textbooks aren't little interactive animations, but substantive learning-by-doing. For example, having a real interpreter or simulator built into the learning software. A good example of this concept is Resig's advanced javascript tutorial (https://johnresig.com/apps/learn/), but you could easily see something similar for learning accounting or other areas where software is integral to the concepts.

>whereas the main goal of textbooks is to convey information

True, but digital textbooks can be more than just 'text'-books. I'm not sure that field you had in mind, but in the scientific field, from chemistry to physics to biology, virtual models can help out a lot.

The entire point of doing lab work in these fields is so that they can associate what they _read_ in the textbook with what they can touch and play around with in the lab. So now I'm talking about bridging the gap. Instead of just conveying information, they can give experiences. Like vibrating a string in specific ways to study harmonic motion, to cutting open a plant's cell membrane to be able to zoom into each part of the plant cell in excruciating detail.

Again, I think we are just limiting ourself to what the conventional method of education has been. I think it is due for a change. With the internet revolution, you don't need a lecturer to be in front of you but you can rather watch a video and text your TA. With VR/AR Coming Soon™, experiences you and I have never had can be part of middle school curriculum. The resources we've put into software can pay off.

> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks. They can have embedded interactive content, ranging from extremely zoomable 2D content to see something in detail to rotatable 3D models. They can have videos. Or just audio, say to listen to case studies or know how a bird sounds. They can have automatically gradable quizzes and exercises. There is so much more digital books can offer.

Yes yes yes yes!

I love your thinking.

I'd love to see a startup specifically targeting this-- A new type of publication. You pay for it like an e-book, but it's interactive like an application, and super high quality.

Maybe we could start with programming books? Take the best of the programming books out there and re-interpret them as this new sort of interactive product.

You might be interested in the work done by Mike Matas + Bret Victor for Al Gore's "Our Choice", I was expecting that project would be the first of a wave of digital books, but I guess it never happened. (Or maybe it did?)

http://pushpoppress.com/ourchoice/

(Mike Matas is now at Facebook and worked on Facebook Paper and Instant Articles, probably other stuff not on his website. Bret Victor is now working on Dynamicland at HARC.)

Yes, digital textbooks can have all those nifty things, but usually don't. And cross-referencing something in a digital textbook? Forget about it. In a paper book it's so much easier to flip back to check something out than in a digital textbook - even more so if you're quickly flipping back and forth comparing passages, or comparing between books. Textbooks work in most lighting conditions, don't need power/recharging, and don't have reflections of the overhead lights to distract you.

They both have their pros and cons, but the actual experience of digital textbooks falls far short of their promise.

We've had textbooks a couple centuries now. It has been about 7 years since the iPad has been released (and then followed the tablet revolution). I'd say give it time.

While I do think that current implementations of digital books are very lacking and thus don't compare as well with physical books as they could, this is one area I have to disagree.

Flipping back through a physical book requires a process of trial and error while looking for that previous page, or referencing the index. A digital book usually comes with a search function that can knock that out a lot quicker.

> Flipping back through a physical book requires a process of trial and error

And yet I am so much faster at finding that vaguely remembered section or passage by using that process of trial and error in a paper book than I am on an ereader. That physical third dimension makes it so much easier to remember roughly where it is.

It doesn't matter if you don't retain anything. Anecdotally at least, I and most people I know absorb information better on the printed paper than on a computer screen. Even when I'm writing code, i'm usually taking notes and drawing diagrams in a notebook. Digital media or a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional dead-tree media.

See this is what I'm saying is a bad comparison. Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen. Say you have a really good screen to write on like the iPad Pro where you have minimal latency, infinite space and colors to work with.

Also I think you preferring paper is more out of habit than any real advantage. I know of professors who need real chalk on their hand because paper and pen just don't work for them.

It has been a personal battle for me too. I love writing on fresh paper with a select few of my favorite pens. It felt like I was doing something, rather than hit away at a keyboard or a screen. But I've convinced myself of the advantages - instant accessibility anywhere, copies to share easily and backups that last a lifetime.

Considering your anecdote about professors who need real chalk on their hand, I wonder if this is a generational thing. Do many people born in the 90s and later still prefer reading from paper and handwriting (regardless of surface)?

FWIW, since I have low vision (from birth), the notion of handwriting being desirable is utterly foreign to me. I could do handwriting, slowly and tediously, but I was happy to do my homework (and later in-class note-taking) on a computer as soon as I could.

>I wonder if this is a generational thing

Exactly.

I don't think the grand-parent poster said anything about preference. It may very well be the case that retention of information is better from dead tree books even though people prefer digital media. (Example: I'm sure most people would prefer to eat chocolate most of the time, but that doesn't really work out so well...)

That said, I think the accessibility argument is an strong one, especially if text can be read out loud and/or re-flowed properly (like on web pages) based on font size, but I honestly don't see why textbooks couldn't be provided both as digital and text. Surely the cost of producing the textbook is pretty marginal if you're already doing whiz-bang animations, etc. for the digital version? The bulk of the text should be identical, I should think.

> Why compare text on paper to text on a screen? Compare text on a paper to rich interactive content on screen.

How would a "rich interactive" version of, say, a historical speech or a short story look like?

Well, for starters you could have little 'Did you know?' pieces embedded in the text. Historical speeches need a ton of context to be assimilated properly. Immediate reference akin to a quick hyperlink based aside can give context without taking away from the continuity of the speech.

> without taking away from the continuity of the speech

Of course it takes away from the continuity. Whether that's good or bad is another question, but not that. If words are to mean anything, that is.

And you can learn about the context before you read the speech. Which makes perfect sense, because the context came before the speech, it was created within it. To first read the speech and then maybe read up on some context here and there is nowhere near the same thing.

Imagine learning a language, and then listening to a musical in that language. Now listen in a musical in a language you don't know with a dictionary. Now I'm not a fan of musicals, but the difference is obvious. You can't make everything infinitely convenient and just in time without losing anything.

> assimilated properly

That's an oxymoron to me. Assimilation isn't proper, and it's not learning.

What's the goal of putting a speech in an history book if not to help people learn about the context?

Destroying the speech is not a problem here. And students can always read it first, read it following references, read it again.

I went to law school. In school, I took notes entirely on the computer, and was convinced that this was the best way. Then, I started practicing law. In meetings and interviews, I took notes entirely on paper, and was convinced it was the best way.

It all depends on context.

This is an excellent point. If digital textbooks are sold as alternatives to physical ones, then I’m not interested as they’re the same copies but one is in a more convenient format (for me.) Why aren’t digital features taken advantage of more often? When I first saw iBooks, that got me excited. Sadly that kind of interactive eBooks never really took off.

I think interactive features aren't used more often because there tends to be significant programming work required to make them. The "explorable explanations" movement has produced amazing works (e.g. http://ncase.me), but there's a lot of custom code involved.

Some aspects of interactivity can be handled by a one-size-fits-all solution (like zoomable charts or embedded video/audio), but I don't think that it will be possible to go much further without involving programmers. And that makes interactive features orders of magnitude more expensive than just a static image, leaving the cool stuff to hobbyists who have the time to make it work.

I know there are specialist JavaScript libraries for this, but I find it hard to believe that there aren’t any WYSIWYG tools that allows you to create layouts and add interactivity such as hotspots and simple animation..

In general I'd rather just have text. The only nice thing about e-books is that they're cheaper and have copy/search.

The DRMed ones remove this and charge as much as the physical books, which just defeats the whole point.

Ebooks will replace physical books when they get integrated with VR.

Even then... I still refer to a book printed in 1857. Not sure my digital content will last that long without massive maintenance and transformations. A physical book only needs to be kept in a dry place, that's all.

>> Digital textbooks can offer so much more than print textbooks.

I agree. I was recently in China lecturing. I took about 100 textbooks on a portable hard drive. It was magic having immediate access to that knowledge. By way of comparison, there was no way I could have taken more than a couple of physical textbooks with me.

BUT I still needed to make my own notes on paper. Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.

>Physically writing notes on paper seems to me to be the best way of summarising material that I need to remember.

Re-iterating what I said elsewhere in the thread. It is a false notion that writing on a paper is somehow superior to typing it out on a keyboard. I feel the only reason people feel better when writing paper notes is because they're used to it. Taking notes on electronic devices is fairly new. It is alien to our brain which have known the other way for a long time.

If you need to quickly add a note or draw a quick sketch then writing on paper has a lot of advantages as compared to typing it out on a keyboard.

Those studies are usually done on students (because they are readily available as research subjects) and those tend to be "digital natives" who are quite used to keyboards.

From an article[1] about one such study:

The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”

“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.

I.e. because a keyboard lets you take more notes, you have to think less about them. Good for literal transcription, bad for actually understanding.

Of course this suggests that taking notes on a laptop might be better if you make it more difficult. E.g. if you had to retype your notes multiple times to avoid them fading away, that would certainly improve retention and encourage conceptualization. You could also enhance it by sending each typed-out word to a text-to-speech engine, thus adding another sensory reinforcement.

But as it is currently practiced, taking notes on a computer apparently still loses out to pen and paper.

[1] http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes...

Thanks. Got a few useful references by using your link as a jumping-off point.

When I had a minimally good e-reader, taking notes on it used to beat paper even it having a delay (that could be engineered out of e-readers).

Then it broke, ditto for the company that made it, and there is nothing more on the market nearly as good. Nowadays I go into paper for taking notes too.

you can have plain video and podcasts, too. i mean that's why people go to lectures, because that format is easier to poick up yet, we are wired for that.