Monday, August 11, 2008
E-Textbooks Coming To A College Laptop Near You
byThe class of 2012 appears to be the largest class of students to hit the college scene. This fall, they will be making their presence known nationwide at 13.6 million students strong. Estimates show that these four-year college students will spend around $4,000 on books throughout their college career. But now, a new e-book service from CafeScribe claims to be a new, easier, greener and less expensive service with which to buy textbooks.
The e-books offered by sites like CafeScribe tend to cost about half that of books found at the bookstore. By downloading textbooks, students are able to access and organize their electronic books in the same way as they file music on their computers.
Textbooks have long been crucial to providing the content because they organize information and make it convenient and manageable for people to learn. The printed textbook, however, is becoming overly expensive for students. With information changing or being added so rapidly, traditional textbooks end up being out of date by the time they appear in print. Digital textbooks, on the other hand, can be regularly revised and updated. Clearly, traditional printed textbooks alone will not be adequate to meet the world’s current education needs.
Not only do these electronic textbooks save on trees and cold-hard-cash, but they usually come with features such as note annotation and highlighting. Students can indicate what type of note they are leaving in their e-book. Options include phrases such as “important” and “ask about later.” These tools show promise to help keep students on track of what they are studying.
Some of CafeScribe’s other features include:
• Social networking
• Adding friends
• Publishing features where you can put your notes
• Access and share others notes
• Creating groups
• Finding study buddies
• Option of selling back e-books to CafeScribe.
With laptops now having near universal presence on college campuses, and textbook prices ever on the rise, technologically inclined students seem poised to change their study habits. They want to change the way textbooks are used and they want to save money at the same time. The current textbook trend is to skip using highlighters and scribbles in the margin, and to trade those habits in for cursors and electronic notes. It’s no surprise that students continue to become more connected and dependent upon their laptops.
CafeScribe currently carries e-books from higher education publishers Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishing Group, Houghton Mifflin Company, Thomson, and Foundation Press, and is working with a variety of other publishers to make additional content available. The e-book company takes daily requests from both students and professors on publishers and books to carry.
With such a service, college students could be experiencing heavier wallets, and lighter backpacks. What remains to be seen is how this switch to e-books will impact college bookstores. The next question is—when will advertisers start utilizing online e-books as a marketing tool?
