In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks | Hacker News Reader

In a Digital Age, Students Still Cling to Paper Textbooks

nytimes.com

21 pointsedw51922 comments

Especially when multiple books are assigned for a class, physical textbooks have one tremendous advantage: as distinct objects, they're great for multitasking and reference.

I can't count the number of times I was working on problem sets, and spread out in front of me on the floor or a big table: two or three different books open to relevant pages, class notes, scratch paper, and a laptop for Google. An unholy mess, but I needed all those resources! If they were all electronic, it would have looked neater to an observer, but I would have either needed six monitors or I'd have been in Alt-Tab hell. All my classmates had the same working style, though that may have been a peculiarity of my physics department.

E-books are good for linear reading (ie fiction), and for keyword searching. They are not (yet) as good for browsing and non-search random access, or for being able to look at multiple resources simultaneously. And I had to do a lot of that in college.

Maybe once digital books and/or their interfaces stop being made of shit the tables will turn.

Every damn one of them has some inane lock-down that any student you ask will run up against, but has no conceivable purpose. And then there's the TOC at the beginning - less than 1/4 of the ones I've encountered even link to the pages they reference, and all non-linking ones I've encountered are incorrect because PDF pages are != book pages (they include the cover). Far far less likely for the index or glossary to be linked (though then there's searching).

They're not selling because publishers are doing squat to make them worth buying. Or even existing beyond being a faster way to search.

It would be pretty powerful if online textbooks linked together like wikipedia. It wouldn't be too hard for a online textbook company to create a script to find instances of words from their index and link them together. If I could mouse over an important vocab word and have other relevant pages pop up, then online textbooks could be seen as more powerful than paper, rather than as an alternative.

Makes me think about why online dictionaries are so powerful compared too flipping through paper dictionaries.

Personally, i tried to buy online versions of my textbooks, but they required me to download their own client to view the textbooks, which didn't work in ubuntu(I wasn't being stubborn about switching to windows, my textbooks were for programming classes so I definitely needed to stay in my programming environment). I can understand not needing to cater to the small niche of people in linux, but a web based app to view the textbooks through the browser would have been much more pleasant for everyone of any OS.

As to the download-their-own-inevitably-crappy-client problem, there's a solution for multiple OSes: Java. A couple have used Java that I've seen, but they're always shockingly poorly implemented and slow. Java can be fast, it just takes smart developers.

Though now that Oracle has it, who knows where it's going to be in a few years.

I want to like ebooks and the readers, and I want them to succeed. But it seems anyone with the ability to push out anything with copyrighted content is going about it ass-backwards, and the free/open crowds aren't usually a whole lot better because they're taking cues from the crap that publishers release.

Take a look at the Aldiko reader for Android.

Menu -> Contents gives you a menu of sections. It also gives you search, bookmarks, etc. Another amazingly useful feature is that it turns your phone's volume control into next/prev page buttons.

Give me an Android tablet and I'll be in heaven (at least, for the few titles that come in ePub format).

Shall look into it, but I feel I must point out:

"menu of sections" implies the producer of the ebook did so. Many textbook-ebooks I've encountered are glorified scans of finished books, not anything built from the original source file (frequently PDF already, or TeX, or etc.)

ebooks for reading are usually better, but textbooks seem to come from a special circle of hell.

I'm using Aldiko for O'Reilly books, which you read similarly to textbooks ("Javascript: the good parts" currently.) Not novels.

I'll grant you that most publishers are far more backwards than O'Reilly, however. If you are stuck with ebooks in the pdfAIL format, there isn't a lot you can do.

I am not very surprised......I like to use a combination of physical and digital copy of a book. Sometimes I just like to write down notes, hell lot of them while learning something new from a book, makes it lot more interesting and engaging.

Once I do some basic learning, its great convenience to be able to search for exactly what I want to refer by using search in the soft copy.

Features-wise, two things would be critical for me to switch completely to e-books:

1) Abitlity to take notes or jot down thoughts on the sides of the pages or markup/underline important sections - can't do without it, it would be too boring to even try reading without being able to do that.

2) Ability to look at multiple pages at the same time - can't do without that too. sometimes its just important for me to be able to look at different pages without having to scroll through the whole lot of pages in between

Coming to think of it, these are not impossible for a dedicated developer to do - probably the pages of interest could be tagged that would allow toggling and can be looked at in multiple windows within the same app window, like looking at multiple files in excel.

somebody gotta try it!

I don't know why everybody keeps trying to digitize books. I know it's cheaper to give someone a download than to make an actual book, but I'm willing to pay more for a print version. Print versions don't strain my eyes as much as computer version, they also look better in my opinion.

If you try taking notes in almost any engineering class on a computer the symbols are such a pain to input on a computer that it's far easier to take notes on paper. (Plus, I actually remember things that I write. I don't remember a lot of things I type.)

I believe that some things in life don't need to be digitized--textbooks and note-taking are two.

I don't know why everybody keeps trying to digitize books.

It makes sense when your reading pattern is either:

A) Books sit on the shelf until you want to look something up in them, at which point you take one down, find what you're looking for, read it and/or copy it down, and then put the book back;

B) You decide to read a book, so you take it down and more-or-less read it through. It's especially handy to have a digital version if you're trying to do this on the train.

But if you're doing the kind of research where you cross-reference a large pile of books, or you're studying intensely from a bunch of books at the same time, paging back and forth in each one to cross-reference it with itself -- i.e. if you're doing academic research or taking college classes -- yeah, e-books are pretty lousy. But you won't be in college forever. And I find that once I've moved my physical book collection around enough times I get pretty tired of having a physical book collection.

I suppose there are a few applications where e-books are handy, but if I'm traveling I normally read magazines. The idea of reading while commuting would be bad: I live in the Midwest--there isn't much in the way of public transit.

I'm not in college anymore, but I sold the books back unless they were particularly interesting. Even now, I prefer to buy programming reference books than using online references. If I can only find a manual online, half of the time I wind up printing it out and putting it in a binder. I write lots of stuff in the margins of reference books.

None of my textbooks have digital versions available. I would switch if I could.

Not me. In the last few weeks, I've probably printed out 500 sheets (printed double-sided) of paper copies of articles I have in electronic form, as part of research I am doing for my Master's thesis. Paper trumps electrons when it comes to serious reading, in my experience.

My general rule of thumb is that I read ficton/nonfiction entertainment books on my Kindle. Its fast and convenient and I don't have to cross reference or compare, I just read from front cover to back cover. For reference or programming/math etc books I still always buy a book copy instead of a digital one. There isn't an effective way to have multiple books open at once on an ereader; nor is there a quick way to flip back and forth between different locations. Until eBooks advance to that stage, I can't see this changing.

Digital versions aren't a good enough replacement for a physical textbook yet. I've used the Nook e-books (on a PC, not on a tablet), and the interface is hell to deal with. But they are fantastic supplements to the real book.

I think they would be a lot more popular if the publishers did with textbooks what record companies are doing with vinyl records: buy the textbook, get a code to download a free digital copy too.

I wish every textbook purchase came with a scan. Or at least an electronic version of the questions.

I wrote about my experiences with NOOKStudy:

http://www.publicstatic.net/2010/10/nookstudy-not-so-great-f...

To summarize:

- The reader sucks

- No price advantage over renting

- Have to "return" the textbook, no option to keep it if you wanted to

I don't understand why digital book sharing hasn't caught on like music/movie sharing, which undisputedly thrived among college students, at least until reasonable alternatives like iTunes and Amazon Music Store came along. You could read digital or print out a hardcopy. Every school I've been to had plenty of print quota for that. I imagine kids are spending more on books than they did/are on music. Is it just the difficulty of scanning/printing?

Most of my exams have been open book - how do you bring a digital book to an open book exam when they won't even let you bring a cell phone?

The problem with textbooks is the price, and the scam publishers use to get you to buy a new edition every six months, making previous versions useless.

I wish some large schools would make publishers sign 'support contracts' enforcing that Edition X of a book would be available for at least 3 years, or similar.

Alternatively, professors could just stop mandating new versions of books every semester. I bet my calculus book from 5 years ago is still relevant. Heck, I bet my dad's calculus book is relevant.

....

I miss college.

When did they start putting out textbooks as unbound stacks of 3-hole punched sheets? My wife is taking a language class and this loose stack of paper is her "textbook".

So to add to the insult of having to buy a binder to hold the damned thing, how do you sell this thing back? How do you know all the pages are there?

Publishers stop printing old books and bookstores then have a hard time of finding enough books to shelve. We're sort of forced to get the new edition. However, there's a growing movement toward open source textbooks for static knowledge.

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