[MGP-Forum Announce] e books are alive and well on campus

[Art Clifford]

Folks,

I've been reading the dialogue regarding e books and the Sony reader with 
some interest.  I and several of my colleagues have been using e books in 
our courses for the last year and we find them enormously useful.  Students 
don't have to pay money for expensive texts such as Melvin Mencher's classic 
newswriting tome, and they don't have to carry the book around, store it, 
and later try to sell it.

Our students currently have access to about 15,000 e books on NetLibrary.com 
(you should visit that site, you can register and access some free books). 
We also have temporary access to a much larger library of e books through an 
organization called ebrary.  Ebrary is the easiest to use, biggest, and, of 
course most expensive.  Their business model works out to be about $2 per 
student for the university library, however.  It's a hit -- with the courses 
that have instructors who use it in their classes.

I may have been motivated to use e books partly because I have some 
international students and GIs who are overseas.  Getting books to those 
folks can take three weeks, or more and that's a major problem for distance 
learning students.
As distance learning grows in popularity, so will the use of e books, e 
periodicals, and newspapers online.

Remember, when the Web started being used by non-scientists in 1993, 
everyone looked at it like it was a toy with only a marginal future for 
academe, or anything else.  It took a couple of years for the 
commercialization to start and the growth of the Web after 1996 became 
almost exponential.  Why? Because college students with Ethernet connections 
became users and began developing new uses for the Web (such as Google). 
College is where to watch if you want to see how e books progress.  And, 
they will.
Art
--
Arthur S. Clifford
Lecturer in Online Journalism
University of Massachusetts
57 Morgan Circle
Amherst, MA 01002
413 549-3886

"I don't think the intelligence reports are all
that hot. Some days I get more out of the
New York Times." --  JFK