The recent announcement of Apple’s iPad has led many to herald it as the future for textbooks. New research suggests however that students will continue to prefer paper over an iPad.
Hundreds of heavy textbooks all upon one small & light device with integrated video clips, interactive quizzes, search functionality and full web browsing. It all seems like a dream come true for students doesn’t it? Well that’s what traditional publishers such as Pearson and McGraw-Hill believe, as they are now busy preparing their thousands of heavy titles ready for the iPad’s release.
BookBoon.com, the world’s largest publisher of free textbooks, decided last week to conduct some research of its own to discover what students themselves thought about using the iPad for textbooks. The company directly contacted its 3000 facebook fans with one simple question; “Would you actually want to read your textbooks on an iPad?”
“The response came as a real shock” said Edward A Blake, Marketing Manager for the company’s U.S and U.K operations. “At first glance, the iPad does look like a real game- changer for us in the publishing industry and so we were all expecting the response to be 99% positive. Instead, what we actually received was an awful lot of negative feedback towards using the iPad for studying – much of it supported by very strong arguments.”
The most common complaint was well summed up by one responded; “It’s one thing to read the latest Dan Brown novel on an iPad for half an hour in bed, but it’s quite another to read ‘Econometric Analysis’ for eight hours straight in the library” Other common responses BookBoon.com encountered were comments such as; “50% of my reading list are PDF files already, but I still continue to print as it’s just easier to concentrate and take notes properly with a print-out version” and “most of my exams are open book style exams which means I can access my books, but electronic devices aren’t allowed into the exam room”.
Perhaps the best illustration of why the iPad won’t replace the textbook anytime soon was given by a student from UCLA. She said, “Leave an iPod, eReader or any laptop lying around in my campus library and it will soon get stolen. I can leave my ‘Corporate Finance’ Textbook for hours though without anyone even touching it…”