Tablets and related devices have redefined publishing, including textbooks. No longer is textbook content necessarily closed, static and non-interactive. The growing expectation of both teachers and students is that Digital Textbooks must deliver a rich, engaging, responsive journey – a thrilling new kind of learning experience.
Opportunity Statement
Digital Textbooks offer a range of highly-creative and significantly disruptive product and service opportunities for publishers, authors, media creators, content aggregators, subject-matter experts, education providers, and tutors.
Prediction Source(s)
Online Colleges – Tech Trends for 2013
This is my baby, so to speak – the first project I worked on at the publishing house I work for was a digital textbook. I think that society will never quite be able to break away from books, paper or digital… that’s why I’m still making digital textbooks five years later.
I am very interested in this topic as well, especially with Alberta moving away from print materials and more into digital materials.
As someone who was formerly involved in educational publishing, I’m very keen to see where digital textbooks are at now and how their potential is being realised.
Really? You don’t think that we will be able to give our paper? I don’t know. I prefer to read on my Kindle, I look things up online far more frequently than I crack open a paper resource. Companies are converting all their training systems to a digital format. I think, in time, this is the way.
For me this is possible the “breakthrough” on this list that is most instantly recognizable. Digital textbooks have enabled me to study and teach in ways I couldn’t previously. As an online tutor, and a Master’s student, I rely on them heavily. The environmental implications alone get this an upvote.
http://i.imgur.com/41iMk.gif
I use digital textbooks at least on a weekly basis. And most of my medical textbooks now come with a code to access the digital copy. The digital copy has added benefits of videos and other online content, which is really helpful. And it beats having to carry textbooks around. I think this is a growing market in education.
The topic of digital textbooks or digital courseware in the corporate arena, is my number one topic of choice. Designed and implemented thoughtfully, digital courseware can both enhance the student learning experience as well as to help protect corporations from courseware piracy. In the last 12 months I’ve seen an amazing array of new products emerge from our developers.
The topic of digital textbooks opportunistic in that it is currently on the radar of almost every school district and prospectively transformative to any level of education that currently uses hard-copy texts. However, I am unconvinced that reality is up to par with the theory. Unlike some of the former responses to this thread, I have had only poor experiences as a student using digital textbooks (disclaimer: my experience to date is only within the MET program and with required texts). I have yet to meet a digital textbook that excites me, although I am open to the potential.
Interesting that nobody has picked up on the trend of open (digital) textbooks in this discussion.
After working in China for a few years, I realized that ordering in print textbooks is not only a lengthy process, but also a very expensive one. China might be a special case, but obviously anyone, anywhere can make the case for the environment. Having textbooks go digital, publishing companies can conveniently attach animations, interactivies and links in their appropriate places amongst the text. I think this is a huge area with a lot of potential.
I love ebooks. I actually prefer ebooks to paper books and I think they are the future but I’m hesitant to put my support behind mandatory etextbooks because currently you’re buying into a market as much if not more than you’re buying into any device. and unfortunately once your in there’s very little competition and it’s hard to get out.
Personally I don’t buy anything with DRM I can’t strip out. With the currently brutal laws about fair use I would be upset if I was forced to buy a crippled ebook that I can’t put on my phone, ipad and eink reader at the same time. As such I would never support them in schools for the moment.
I am very interested in digital textbooks especially for my French Immersion students. We are constantly struggling to provide up to date, grade appropriate material for our students. With ebooks we could provide these books to our students at a faster rate as well as for a lower cost (hopefully), our admin is always leery about buying French books, since usually they cost quite a bit more than the English versions.
Digital texts are an important accommodation for students who have reading deficits. I put them on their computer with a screen reader and they are able to have the computer read to them while they follow witty their hard copy (paired reading)
I honestly don’t know about the future of textbooks, as they are defined in the traditional sense. Recently I’ve been talking with colleagues in the CBE and they say in the lower levels textbooks have gone the way of the dinosaur, and that they are moving to phase them out of Junior and Sr. High Schools in the next 10-15 years. Instead they are replacing them with worksheets, learning objects, applications and discovery learning activities. If you look at many university courses such as ours, textbooks aren’t used at all, rather we are guided towards articles. I think the future will lie more in collections of resources students can access, rather than specific books. Additionally, Sadly, costs of digital books aren’t much lower than paper books, since most of the cost of publication is behind the scenes, not the actual publishing.
Big press release in British Columbia this morning about open textbooks, another form of digital textbooks.
http://www.newsroom.gov.bc.ca/2013/09/free-open-textbooks-available-for-students-and-instructors.html