Article in “The Chronicle of Higher Education”
The trickiest part of teaching with electronic textbooks is getting everyone on the same page—or to the same part of the digital text. That’s what a professor in the honors college at Arizona State University found last month at the start of an experimental class with Amazon Kindle e-book readers.
There are no page numbers for books on the Kindle; instead, every passage has a “location number,” which lets users jump to that section. Those numbers can be long, and it can be awkward to type them on the small keyboard. So when Ted Humphrey, the professor, asked students to turn to a certain passage in the Iliad, there were “some glitches,” he says, as a few students mis typed the location number.
“You have to hold down an ‘alt’ button to type in the numbers,” which can be cumbersome, says Carson Cook, a student in the required course in Western civilization, who also worries that it will be difficult to take notes in the digital margins using the Kindle’s keyboard.
cost of e books
The adoption of e-textbooks depends almost entirely on cost. As things stand today e-books are not cheap and are almost never cheaper than the alternative (a used textbook that the student can sell back to the bookstore/online). The best option for students is still to get a used textbook online/sell it at the end of the semester; the best site for this is http://www.wecomparebooks.com (they guarantee low prices)