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

[r.chatham at att.net]

What about E-books replacing Textbooks?  Does anyone have cost benefit info?  Are the textbook publishers developing e-textbooks?  If the E-book becomes the tool to replace textbooks, will it not evolve into a communications tool?
Rod Chatham

-------------- Original message from "Art Clifford" <clifford at admin.umass.edu>: -------------- 


> 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 
> 
> 
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