So it's interesting to be at a conference at which there are people who are trying to develop e-textbook platforms and others who want to know where the business of textbooks is headed.
During day 1 of the conference, there was a short presentation by a speaker (a consultant) who talked about the business model for publishers. He argued that the more e-textbooks contain personalized content, the more they will see a business value. It was not clear why. Would publishers want to control the kinds of annotations that students add to e-textbooks or would they use that data to market products? (The speaker referred to this as "differentiated content.") The speaker acknowledged research (from Daytona State College) that showed that students were not enthusiastic about using e-textbooks again after using them for a semester. (One finding of this research was that students preferred renting paper textbooks.)
We voted on which 7 topics to talk about in small groups. Winners were student receptivity, technology platforms, large e-text initiatives--and I forgot the other four. Accessibility was not one of them, and one person in the crowd spoke up and asked where that could be discussed.
At the student receptivity discussion, we talked about a variety of ways that schools have tried to measure students' acceptance (or avoidance) of e-textbooks. There are many librarians here--one says that it is logical for them to work with e-textbooks because libraries have existing relationships with publishers. One large school has conducted a big pilot with an e-textbook provider and found that the majority of students did not want to use an e-textbook again. Also, he said that most of the students (and instructors) did not take advantage of the annotation tools in the e-reader (and there was no relationship between e-text usage and students' grades). They are doing the pilot project again in Fall 2012 because they want to try the system again now that it has been improved. Lots of discussion about how students like paper textbooks, like sharing them with classmates, like selling them back. One finding was that students who did not like the e-textbook felt that it was too distracting to use an e-textbook on their laptop, where they were tempted to facebook, surf the web, chat, etc. There is concern that one e-reader provider would like institutions to use their assessment instruments. Some schools have run into trouble trying to ask their own questions.
So the people involved with companies who develop e-readers have had mixed results...some very enthusiastic people are here, working on their own e-textbook initiative at UIUC. Self publishing of textbooks is big at UIUC. At the table where they talked about initiatives to publish e-textbooks locally, it was all UIUC people. And they did not all know each other. Some UIUC faculty, who have written their e-textbooks, are here to discuss their processes. One chemistry professor has made an online app for chemical equations, which is integrated with his online e-textbook and is working well for him. UIUC seems exceptional in this area of self publishing.
The UIUC undergraduate writing program has developed an e-textbook that they sell to their students. It is an HTML 5 e-textbook with annotation tools, and is accessible. They wanted to build an accessible environment because the companies that make e-readers have often not paid enough attention to accessibility and just put "pictures of textbooks" in their systems that do not meet accessibility standards. To purchase the writing e-textbook (used by all students in undergraduate rhetoric), students go to the textbook store and purchase a scratch-off card with a code that they use to access the e-textbook. They must buy this because the entire course "happens" in the e-textbook--my understanding is that without the e-textbook students cannot complete assignments. They need their own. They can download an epub version that they can use offline, but they won't have access to their annotations. Essentially, there is one e-textbook, and students' annotations live on a database. Each time they log-on, their annotations are pulled down to the e-text they are viewing. (When the developers were building this, they asked a professor if she would want to receive an e-mail each time someone created a highlight. She said no way.)
There isn't much research about this initiative. The head of undergraduate writing program won a national award for this innovation in instruction. They have collected a bunch of surveys that they are still analyzing.
More thoughts to come...
