The Advantages of E-Textbooks

Imagine a day when youngsters would leave for school carrying nothing more than an electronic device weighing less than one pound. The advent and growing popularity of electronic textbooks may make this a reality sooner rather than later. No more students trudging around with 20 pound backpacks strapped to their backs. No more lockers jammed with textbooks and notebooks. The benefits of transitioning to e-textbooks are many and provide advantages for both students and educators.

Electronic textbooks can be updated faster than traditional textbooks and can also provide resources that traditional books cannot supply. Because reprinting textbooks is expensive, they are rarely corrected and schools frequently have outdated versions that are 5 – 10 years old (Acker, 42). The information in traditional textbooks is often obsolete and the pictures can be very dated. For example, Pluto is still listed as a plant in our solar system in many science books even though it was decided in 2006 that it is actually a dwarf planet. In some cases, a textbook may be updated every few years, but many high schools do not purchase the new edition because of the high cost involved. In our current economy, many schools can neither justify nor afford the several hundred dollars it would cost to purchase a new edition for just a few changs. With e-texts, corrections and updates can be made quickly and at a fraction of the cost of their printed counterparts. In addition, e-textbooks include more than just the words. “The nature of literacy is changing; it includes not only text but also symbols and visual images or icons that make up graphic user interfaces.” (Hassell, 117) Visual images and icons can be found on practically every electronic ...

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