Slide 8
Slide 8 text
GOING DIGITAL
•“Hybrid” textbooks have been common for some time.
•And unless you’ve taught college recently, you’d be amazed at the instructor
scaffolding that comes with a typical textbook. It’s all digital, of course.
•E-textbooks have not found much of a market otherwise.
•Students mostly HATE them. Lack of annotations, sharing, highlighting, printing,
pagination, resale, retention are common sticking points. (Searchability a plus.)
•Another major problem: lousy production values. Some “e-textbooks” are (I kid
you not) just scan-to-PDFs. Without OCR, even, so they’re not searchable!
•Is this hate partly a generational thing? I don’t know (yet), but it could be. Ten
years ago conventional wisdom was “nobody will read a book onscreen!”
•Enter... e-textbook platforms!
•Publisher/aggregator: “O hai higher ed. Look at all our shiny e-textbooks! U
want them? U can haz them all, for one low, low price!”
•Universities (the few, the large, the gullible): “Wow, sounds great!”
•Me, doing my best Admiral Ackbar impression: “It’s a trap!”