As students return from our long winter break, many are bringing holiday presents back to campus. Electronic reading devices were hot items on everyone’s list. Whether it’s the new Kindle 3, the Nook Color, Borders’ Kobo, the Samsung Galaxy or the ubiquitous iPad, e-readers are here to stay. Sheer novelty may have contributed to their first-generation popularity, but their practical advantages over paper books are indisputable. Most of us, constrained by limited budgets, are scholars who need to maximize study-time efficiency and are environmentally sensitive citizens.
As individual readers, it may be hard to overcome an emotional attachment to the “feel” of a paper book. But in terms of overall policy, the time has come to make e-books standard practice in the classroom. In the long run they are less expensive and more environmentally friendly than antiquated bound-books, and have more useful tools for studying. They are also lighter.
The worst on-campus victim of paper books is our collective posture. A typical student walks around campus with an unnaturally arched spine and tensely craned neck, struggling to lug a thirty-pound knapsack from class to class. If e-readers lost their stigma in the academic world, the average student would stand two inches taller. Amazon’s Kindle 3 weighs in at 8.5 ounces, while your average Physics textbook can be a whopping 112 ounces. Make the switch and your back will thank you.
E-readers also save trees. As Hopkins makes a push to be as green as it can outside the classroom through initiatives like solar panel roofs, so too should it push to conserve the environment within the classroom. It takes raw materials and energy to manufacture an electronic book, but the break-even point is at about a hundred volumes. A typical reader might take a year or so to read that much; at Hopkins a freshman is likely to move into the green zone within the first semester.
The most convincing benefit of e-readers may be that they save students money. The upfront cost of around $120 is quickly amortized because e-books are far less expensive than print versions. Distributors like Google and Amazon have made millions of classics free on electronic reading devices. Downloading a contemporary book can cost about $20 less than buying a hard copy. Universities should be lobbying publishers to make all textbooks available electronically so that in the long run the differential in favor of e-books will become even more dramatic.
Lastly, e-readers are simply better for studying than traditional books. Most of the third- and fourth-generation devices have built-in dictionaries and web browsers. This is a tremendous resource for students who no longer have to put down their book to a) find out what a word means or b) look up a reference on the internet.
Rather, students have access to invaluable research tools in the palms of their hands. The latest e-readers allow for ear-marking pages and even taking notes, which address two of students’ complaints about the early devices. Best of all, notes are no longer confined to tiny margins that restrict how much a student can put down on the page, but rather are inserted like word documents. Students will no longer come to class unprepared to participate due to a forgotten book because the new e-readers allow for on-the-spot downloading.
A fear students have of e-readers is the “page-number crisis.” Many feel an e-reader would put them at a disadvantage since the devices don’t use pages to track progress in a book but rather locations. While there is legitimate cause for concern, fret not, since e-readers can come to the rescue once again. Firstly, if everyone uses an e-reader, no problem exists because locations act the same way as pages. Second, to mollify the concerns of early adopters, the newer generations of e-readers allow for “finding” phrases — so all one needs is to know a sentence on a page and he can jump there immediately.
Professors, especially ones who have issues with students surfing the web in class, should also embrace e-readers. Although e-readers do have web browsers on them, most screens are in e-ink (black-and-white) making Facebooking or video watching practically impossible.
E-readers should, and inevitably will, become the accepted standard in academia. They are superior to paper books in almost every way. But when I’m back home on my next break from school, I’m still going to collapse in an armchair with a thick, hard-cover, paper novel.
