Digital textbooks have some benefit
I’m old school when it comes to reading books — I love having the physical copy in front of me. There’s nothing more exciting than touching the pages or feeling of your highlighter dragging across the page or watching the ink dry after writing a note in the margins.
According to a statistics report in 2016 for Tech Times, I’m like 80 percent of college students surveyed in 2013 who prefer reading physical textbooks. This number is down from 92 percent in 2010.
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The Washington Post published statistics in February of 2015 that put e-book sales at 9 percent of textbook sales.
I’ve only read articles and blog posts online. I finally got into audio books back in 2015. Yet, I’ve never read a digital book, whether it be for leisure or school. The concept was to foreign for me, because e-book technology emerged around my senior year of high school.
When I found out that my history of world art I class here at USD requires a digital textbook, I was anything but thrilled.
Although I wasn’t looking forward to carrying around a heavy art history textbook, I was looking forward to seeing the examples of artwork in print.
Yet, my digital textbook has an improvement over a physical book: I can zoom in to see better detail of the artwork.
I can also highlight text, make notes and view occasional videos throughout the digital textbook.
What really got me over the hump of disappointment, besides the fact that I could buy a loose-leaf coup for $20, is that I can listen to it as if were an audio book.
Although this feature has its limitations — I have to press the audio button for each section — it’s a perk I like when reading in the busy Muenster University Center.
USD bookstore manager Angela Miller said it’s hard to say how many courses at USD use digital textbooks. This is because how after a professor submits their book list, the system automatically generates an e-book option if there is one.
Miller said that several courses, such as the intro English comp course, now utilize First Day Access.
First Day Access allows students enrolled in these courses to gain access to their digital textbooks and have them paid for as part of their tuition. Miller said she worked with textbook publishers to have this as an option at a cost-effective price.
And like everything these days, there’s an app I’m able to use to access my textbook on my iPhone. The app tells me what the current assignment is, my performance on assignments and offers an alert option for when an assignment is due.
Despite my initial reservations, digital textbooks have some perks that are starting to make them contenders to use.
