South Korea plans to convert all textbooks to digital | Hacker News Reader

South Korea plans to convert all textbooks to digital

engadget.com

44 pointscodelion9 comments

One nice side effect of having digital textbooks (in college) is it deals with the pesky second market for used books. One course, one book, one non-transferable license for the quarter. Sweet no more beer money after finals.

While this might be true in some schools, I think Digital Textbooks can be the double edged swords of beer money on a world stage at least in the early stages. I actually saved money by not having to buy textbooks because our school digitized the library--no doubt further down the line publishers and even Authors (read: professors) will try and monetize that system when they realize scholastic book sales are down but until then, drink up my friend.

Knowing SK, this is probably just the result of giving a special deal to a chaebol that has cozy relations with the government. Noble goals such as advancing the state of the art in education are the last things on their minds.

I think I'm in the minority here by saying this because I am not as technically savvy as most of you, but after reading some of the comments on the article page, I'm actually happy that the United States and Canada haven't rushed into this--call me old fashioned, but I think as great as it would be to have your own little tablet for school--there's a lot to be said about the typical worldly adventures young students get into by not being absorbed by the screen of a machine. Don't get me wrong, computers probably do need to be more incorporated into the school system (I know I would have liked a programming course in elementary school) but it shouldn't be all encompassing, which is what I sort of see with the steps South Korea is taking.

There's a big difference between children's picture books and college textbooks, though. College texts are clunky, overpriced behemoths that are discard year after year for superflous installments. Owning a book in hardcopy becomes worthless if the student is unable to annotate in it and treat it as his or her own because they plan on reselling it afterwards to get some money back.

It's worse in law school. > Some of the books are enormous A lot of people I know get their books cut into smaller pieces and rebound because the books are so heavy. > Annotating the books is a necessity for many people because there is a lot of difficult reading and you need to find ways to focus on the important bits.

I, for one, would welcome the digitization of as many law schools books as possible.

I wonder which platform they will use for the tablet (Android, Meego.. Bada?) and for the content format (epub/mobi). I'm assuming the textbooks would be mainly in korean.

Now the teacher can for sure know if you "opened" the book.

The two links at the end of the engadget article seem to have better coverage:

http://www.technologyreview.in/blog/mimssbits/26960/

http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/06/30/2011...

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