My first e-textbook experience: Big disappointment from Pearson

(Teleread, By Ficbot)

I’ve just had my first e-textbook experience, and if this is what the future of e-books in education looks like, color me disappointed.

The course is an on-line summer credit offered by a somewhat local university. I have taken one such course every summer for the last three years to add various teachables to my teaching credentials, and in the past, the course has consisted of the following:

• A print textbook.
• An online forum with an organizer listing the schedule of readings, discussion questions for them, etc., and a message board to talk about them
• A “lecture” for each section of the course which could be read on-line or cut and pasted to a word file
• A section of Internet links to other websites or readings

This course had an “e-book” option where one could pay on a sliding scale to get a) a print book and “access” the e-version b) only a print book c) only the e-version “access.” I suppose the word ‘access’ should have clued me in that this was not a PDF or some-such, but I was just so excited not to have to deal with the clutter of a paper copy (and to save the $20 more plus shipping that the deluxe “e-book plus paper copy” would cost) that I didn’t investigate the situation more carefully.

I came to regret this. If the e-book system used by this course is any way becoming the “standard,” then e-books have no way of conquering the mainstream educational market.

The”’e-book” was compiled by a site called Pearson Educational Media. One can access the “e-book” by setting up an account with them and logging in. From here, I thought I would get a PDF, perhaps with a password, but what I instead got was a Macromedia Flashpaper document. There was no facility to download the text as a file so it could be read on a mobile device. There was no facility to cut and paste the text into a word processor to make your own file to read on a mobile device. You could not even use the arrow keys to read easily off the screen; you needed a mouse so you could move down the hand or click on the arrows. You could print the book to paper. That was the only real “functionality” you had beyond sitting in front of your computer and clicking with the mouse.

There were some other usability concerns. Our on-line postings to the message board required that we respond in such a way as to prove we had done the readings. But there was no cut and paste! So if you had the e-book open in one window and the message board open in another, and you wanted to quote a line or two, you would have to switch back and forth between the two windows and manually type in every word! It’s ridiculous. I still think cutting and pasting the whole shebang into Word so I could read it on my Sony is fair and should be permitted, but you could persuade me why this might not be allowed. But two lines, to put into my message board post? I can’t do that? Piracy of three-year-old journal articles from educational trade magazines is such an issue? Why even have an e-book if you have to type it in from scratch anyway?

Here was another issue: the search box. It seemed to work fine for standard text—plain, simple, less formatted stuff that seemed to come from textbook chapters. But it could not make sense of anything formatted (such as call-out boxes from scanned magazine articles) or anything that wasn’t just regular, basic text. One particularly vital chapter seemed to be scanned from an older book, and there was a lot of ’static’ on the page. The whole chapter was unreadable by the search function. Every time I wanted to refer to it, I had to manually scroll back and find what I was looking for. And of course, once I found it, I had to juggle two windows back and forth while I manually retyped whatever word or phrase I wanted…

So what did my $35 get me? “Access” to a website (for the duration of the course only) that pretty much lets me look, but not touch. No ability to download to my mobile device. No ability to cut and paste even two words from one browser window into another. Limited ability to search for parts I want read later, the usefulness dependent on whether the parts important to me have the fortune to be recognized by the program as actual words. And if I want to keep any of it after the course is done, only a print button and a pile of papers, just like in the old days. This is progress?

At minimum, we should have a PDF we can download and read off-line, and the ability when reading off the OC to copy/paste even in a limited way. Better still would be if they took the raw scans, run them through an OCR program and left us with text we could actually search and bookmark. I would not “buy” another textbook under a scheme such as the current one. I hate reading lengthy documents off a computer screen and need to be able to download it for off-line, off-computer use. And an e-book that a) requires you to print it in order to read it later b) does not let you copy even a snippet from one browser window to another c) only sometimes allows you to search through text as if they were actual words is barely an e-book at all.