Back to school? Guide to the right e-reader

[Alexander Turcic]

Ready to pack away the swim trunks and head back to school? Well, friends, before you spend lots of money on heavy, musty textbooks, you might consider replacing the overstuffed backpack with a lightweight, portable e-book reader. Whether you're buying a dedicated reading device, or want to use your tablet for reading, different devices work with different book formats, and some are better than others. The folks at Computer Shopper offer some advice in their 2013 Best E-Readers for School guide.

If you're open to buying an e-reader (or perhaps can't afford a tablet), consider these other factors before adding one to your back-to-school list. First, if possible, check your reading list against what's available electronically. Fiction, scholarly, and other non-fiction texts are increasingly available as e-books, but depending on your curriculum, you may be doomed to paper textbooks for some classes for the next few years. Also, elementary- and high-school students should check rules governing electronic devices. Even college students should check on their professors' preferences, and should find out which model of e-readers (if any) are supported by the college library.

[image: Flickr]

[vivaldirules]

"First, if possible, check your reading list against what's available electronically. Fiction, scholarly, and other non-fiction texts are increasingly available as e-books, but depending on your curriculum, you may be doomed to paper textbooks for some classes for the next few years."

Yes, of course. So what's the general conclusion people are coming to these days? If you're headed off to your first year at university, what seems to be the typical fraction of the books you'll need that are available in some ebook format? Does anyone here have any recent data or experiences? Just a couple of years ago, this was hopeless. Have things changed materially?

[medard]

Nowadays you need to download almost all papers and tutorials for a seminar or a course of lectures from the university webpage. You don't get this stuff in paper anymore, you download it as PDF or Word files.

If your books for university are available as ebooks depends on what you're studying and which library system your university is using. It shouldn't be a big deal to get a lot of books as ebooks. But almost everything will be PDF.

[Alexander Turcic]

Originally Posted by medard

But almost everything will be PDF.

... which would put non-E Ink larger-screen tablets with faster CPUs to an advantage.

[HomeInMyShoes]

^Yep. I don't even think there's any discussion of e-ink for school. 98% of what I read in grad school was PDF.

[medard]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

... which would put non-E Ink larger-screen tablets with faster CPUs to an advantage.

Not necessarily. I liked these sentences in the article:

And there's a further, seldom-considered advantage of buying an E Ink, monochrome e-reader: Some may appreciate visiting what we like to call "E-Reader Island," a place where the audio, video, and social-media temptations of tablets just aren't there. And let's face it, students are forced to read, so don't they deserve to use a device that's dedicated to reading, and the kind best at simulating eye-pleasing paper?

I think tablets have a lot of advantages over other devices. And right now there is no better solution for reading PDF files than a tablet. But this might change in some months. I think in autumn 2014 we might have much better mobile devices to study PDF files than we have now.

[Jessica Lares]

The community college classes I've been taking lately don't require textbooks. It's more like they give you a list of recommended reading and printouts. So in my experience, I would say the textbook is dying. I've only bought two for $40 in eBook format for this certificate I'm doing. This semester I have to buy another two that will cost me about the same.

It's pretty sweet being able to buy the book right there and then in the classroom.

Not sweet is the tuition going up again. I'm paying the amount for one class that I did for two the year I started.

So far everything's a Kindle Edition though. Haven't had to buy any PDFs yet, but then I'm not studying to be a doctor nor have I done the basic curriculum since my entry test scores don't let me.

Overall my experience has been that e-ink works poorly for them, even when it's a black and white storyboarding guide. You're better off with the Kindle Fire, iPad, or another Android tablet. The bigger, the better.

[medard]

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

Overall my experience has been that e-ink works poorly for them, even when it's a black and white storyboarding guide. You're better off with the Kindle Fire, iPad, or another Android tablet. The bigger, the better.

Really? Thanks a lot for sharing this. I'll have a closer look at some tablets in some stores in the next days then. I think I need to see some to understand why people like them so much.

Originally Posted by Jessica Lares

The community college classes I've been taking lately don't require textbooks. It's more like they give you a list of recommended reading and printouts. So in my experience, I would say the textbook is dying. I've only bought two for $40 in eBook format for this certificate I'm doing. This semester I have to buy another two that will cost me about the same.

Depending upon how you look at it, it was pretty much the same when I was in university many years back. They did have recommended textbooks, but most of the instructors from the second year onward were doing exactly as you said.

There seemed to be an intense frustration with the textbook industry. This is as true for faculty members as it is for student. They understand how textbooks add to the cost of education, and are tired of the incredible number of editions that they have to deal with. (Even forcing students to use the latest edition requires instructors to adapt their courses to new editions.)

Textbooks don't fit into higher education environments very well either, since academic freedom is often valued more than a rigid curriculum.

I suppose that all of this, plus the limitations of ereaders, means that the right ereader for school is no ereader at all. Tablets are only slightly better, but computers or old fashioned hardcopies are the best way to access print. After all, this allows for information to be compiled from a variety of sources. Some of these sources are better in that they are developed with the practice and objectives of higher education in mind. Some of these sources are better because students are learning how to use primary sources rather than distillations.

As for primary and secondary education, well, that's somewhat different. Yet even though it's somewhat different I doubt that you'll find that dedicated ereaders (either devices or apps) are any better. First of all, I haven't seen any solid proof that it's cheaper. (Sure, you have claims. Yet the cost of educational resources often tear those claims to shreds.) Compatibility with school resources and licensing restrictions often make independent purchases impractical. Finally, there is a push to use more interactive materials at this level.

It would be wonderful if education could jump into this digital age, but it is being held back by the industry as a whole. I would not suggest leaping over the cliff built by industry.

[vivaldirules]

I did a quick test by selecting first year undergraduate Bio, Chem, Calculus, and Physics courses at one of my alma maters (a "state" university) and checked to see what books are needed. The chemistry text is available as a printed textbook or as a rentable online ebook through CourseSmart. The calculus text is available either as a printed notebook or online through MyMathLab. The biology and physics books are available only as printed textbooks. None are available even as PDFs. I'd call that a clear fail.

EDIT: By the way, it appears that only the CourseSmart ebook would be accessible from a tablet. The MyMathLab ebook appears to require either Windows or Mac computer. Your ebook reader? You can use it to read Moby Dick during lunch, I suppose.

[yue]

I'm currently studying journalism, and will need access to three text books in the next study term - text books which are, frustratingly, only available as print editions. I was so excited to purchase them for use on my Kobo, too! It's especially frustrating due to one of the classes being on technology and 'new communication media'; I would have been certain that there would be electronic editions of textbooks about electronic journalism at the very least!

[AHMavrick]

Frankly I can see some university profs going this route if they can work out getting the royalties they enjoy form teaching from the textbooks they author. It was my experience back in the old old days before even pagers were invented and handheld calculators went for $100 or more that profs made a lot of their money publishing. Making frequent, or specifically annual, re-writes got them guaranteed royalties on their mandated text books.

I would enjoy not having to carry a collection of books but I would also figure on needing more than one reader. Murphy's law being what it is, you KNOW that the text you need for tomorrows critical exam will be on the reader that just went belly up into electron heaven. That and batteries will be an issue. It was very unpleasant to have my spiffy and necessary expensive calculator go dead in the middle of the mid term statistics exam. Fortunately the prof loaned me his, minus the answers darnit.

Originally Posted by AHMavrick

Frankly I can see some university profs going this route if they can work out getting the royalties they enjoy form teaching from the textbooks they author. It was my experience back in the old old days before even pagers were invented and handheld calculators went for $100 or more that profs made a lot of their money publishing. Making frequent, or specifically annual, re-writes got them guaranteed royalties on their mandated text books.

I studied and worked in universities for over a decade, and only ran into this sort of thing a handful of times: twice for books written by the prof, once for a book translated by the prof, once for a book written by another faculty member. There were also locally produced lab manuals, but the prices were always in line with reproduction costs. Of the two books written by the course instructor, one was into it for the money and he unkindly called me a country lawyer when I discovered that it cost money to take quizzes (which was against university policy) and the prof was a founder of the company that offered those quizzes (clear conflict of interest). The other instructor was okay with students photocopying the relevant sections of his book. Beyond that, I found that very few profs actually expected students to buy the textbook after first year. Even profs for first year courses rarely expected students to have the current edition (and the main reason why they expected students to have the textbook in first year courses was to reduce the demand created by students for additional help due to large class sizes). On top of that, I'm not convinced that upper year textbooks are all that profitable due to the low demand.

There's a lot wrong with the textbook publishing industry, but I'm afraid that some of the most common conspiracy theories just don't hold water.

[Alexander Turcic]

From my personal experience I fully agree with the quote medard cited. With a tablet, temptation to do what you're not supposed to do (i.e. read boring overlong textbooks) is much stronger than with a technically underperforming E Ink device. In other words... ever since I've spent more time with tablets, my total reading consumption went down.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic

From my personal experience I fully agree with the quote medard cited. With a tablet, temptation to do what you're not supposed to do (i.e. read boring overlong textbooks) is much stronger than with a technically underperforming E Ink device. In other words... ever since I've spent more time with tablets, my total reading consumption went down.

It's not just tablets. Yrs back I worked for a company that had a contract to clean the local clinic in the evenings. One of my co-workers had the task of cleaning some Dr's offices and one evening she was unable to clean an office right away because the Dr. was still there on his computer. He wasn't working on patient files either. He was playing solitaire.