I want to love eBooks, I really do. I think there is enormous potential for digital books in education, especially with the rise of cheaper tablets and smartphones. But, I also think that as long as publishers control the ecosystem, the promise of eBooks won’t be realised and they’ll never provide the learning opportunities they could.
The problem (or rather, one of the problems) is that publishers see digital and online simply as a distribution system for digital versions of paper books. For publishers, eBooks are the same as paper books, and until they throw away the old paradigm of a book being a series of pages with static content, eBooks will have little to offer learners besides a more efficient delivery of content.
Those were a few thoughts running through my mind after a presentation I attended yesterday by the International Association for Digital Publishers (IADP), a UK-based, non-profit organisation who really are trying to bring about positive change, particularly in developing countries. They work closely with publishers to make digital textbooks available for students at substantially reduced costs, which is not a bad thing.
But, at the end of the day the digital textbooks that come through the publishers are still the same as paper books, except they have more restrictions. They can’t be resold. Text can’t be highlighted or annotated (this is not always the case, but often it is). They are often locked to a single device (I know this isn’t the case with the Kindle). They can’t be lent to someone else. Before I can get behind eBooks for education, here is a list of features that I’d like to see (I haven’t done any research on this, so some of these may already be present in some readers).
- Social annotations and highlighting. Students and teachers must not only be able to make their own notes and highlight text, but they must be able to see what others in the same course are writing. Notes and highlights should have at least three levels of permissions controlling who can see your notes.
- Public – everyone who owns the same book
- Group – everyone in the same arbitrary collection of people e.g. class, institution, book club, etc.
- Private – only you
- The content should be editable after the purchase of the book. Students should be able to embed videos, class presentations and images into the book. They should be able to combine text from different sources to make their own chapters. They should be able to add external links to the reference list, or page citations, pointing to related content on the web.
- “Audio” must be built in. All content should be available to be listened to. Even images should have “alternate text” tags that allow authors to describe the image. Students should be able to listen to their books while traveling, and should be able to record their own audio notes.
- Books must be available across multiple devices, including desktop computers, laptops, tablets, phones, and even TV’s. This is a challenge as long as you think of digital books as being single items, which is how publishers see it. As long as they can keep convincing you that an eBook is a single product, they can control how that product is distributed. But, why shouldn’t I be able to maintain multiples copies of my digital book across multiple devices?
- Student should be able to rent books, either from publishers or from university libraries. At least if I buy a book that’s only needed for a semester, I can resell it later. Once I buy an eBook, there’s nothing I can do with it when I no longer need it.
This list is hardly exhaustive and I’m sure I’ll think of other features to add, just as soon as I’ve posted this. I also realise that there are problems with the features mentioned above, mostly related to the DRM restrictions that publishers insist on to protect their intellectual property. However, I also think that until we stop thinking of eBooks as collections of pages with static content, we’ll be stuck behind the old paradigm of printed books, and they’ll have little to offer students besides more restrictions on what they can do with the books they’ve paid for.
We can’t control what the publishers do with their books, but we can be more thoughtful about what we want for our students and ourselves. Publishers are selling us short by continuing to give us the same books that we’ve had for centuries, except now we’re even more constrained in what we can do with them. What do you think? Is the current situation the best that eBooks and publishers have to offer, and if not, then what can we do to change the system?