7.The_Textbook_of_the_Future_哈工大研究生英语

The Textbooks for the Future

1、The rumble of textbooks thumping on to the desks of a university lecture theatre, the rustle of turning pages, the groan of backpack straps hoisting 10 kilograms of textbooks — these sounds may soon be an echo of the past. This semester, 1,200 students at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) are foregoing printed textbooks in a pilot trial of Amazon Kindle e-readers stuffed with texts in electronic form. At NorthWest Missouri State University (NWMSU) in Maryville, classes are testing textbooks on Sony e-readers, as well as on the students' own laptops, as part of plans to roll out e-textbooks across all courses within 5 years. The list goes on: within the past 18 months or so, as textbook publishers have begun to make more and more titles available online, universities worldwide have begun to experiment with e-textbooks.

2、"E-textbooks are not yet mainstream — but they are on the edge of a breakthrough into the mainstream," says Kevin Hegarty, UTA chief financial officer. Indeed, textbook publishers are scrambling to position themselves for a revolution in the way they do business as they rethink their decades-old model of massive, printed tomes sold at premium prices.

3、The resulting proliferation of new models — none of which is yet a sure winner — is being shaped by the interplay of at least three forces: new e-readers and displays for viewing and interacting with the e-textbook content; new business and licensing models for delivering quality content at prices students and universities can afford; and new concepts for the content itself, and for how it is created.

4、On the hardware front, e-textbooks are reaping the benefits of rapid innovation in electronic readers for documents and novels. Most of the latest generation of e-readers, such as Amazon's Kindle 2 and Sony's PRS-700, offer displays based on technology from the E-Ink Corporation of Cambridge, Massachusetts. These displays produce text and images that rival the brightness and clarity of ink on paper, which makes reading them far more comfortable than reading text on the liquid crystal display screens of laptops and desktop computers. They also allow an e-reader's batteries to last for days: the displays require power only when the screen is being changed — for example, by 'turning' a page. The first generation of such e-readers, launched less than three years ago, has already sparked mass uptake of e-books, and they could potentially do the same for e-textbooks.

5、As delivery vehicles for textbooks, however, existing e-readers still leave a lot to be desired. For example, most are designed for reading books from beginning to end. But "very few students read a textbook in that manner", says Paul Klute, who is directing the NWMSU

e-textbook project. He recalls how the school launched its pilot test of the Sony's PRS-505 reader in autumn 2008 with e-textbooks from six publishers. It was an instant flop with the 200 student testers. They wanted to do what they had always done, says Klute, and flip through to find bits they didn't grasp in the lecture, or dip in to read short sections, or find a key figure. But the

e-reader wasn't built for this, so they ended up frustrated. This semester, Sony has replaced the device with the newer PRS-700. Its search and navigation functions and the ability to flip a page by swiping a finger across the touch screen have elicited a much more positive response, Klute says.

6、Another drawback of current e-readers is that they have small black-and-white displays, just a little larger than 9 by 12 centimetres. This makes them unsuited to most science textbooks, which typically have large pages and colourful graphics. "The market is not likely to expand until the e-readers improve," says Hegarty.

7、Many large textbook companies are holding off from experimenting with e-readers until that happens. But manufacturers promise that big screen, colour e-readers are on the way within a year or two. If so, this will be the tipping point at which e-textbooks take off, predicts Hegarty. "It will be a big leap forwards," he says.

8、Dedicated e-readers currently start at prices of around US$350, points out Joe Esposito, a digital-media consultant and former chief executive of Encyclopaedia Britannica online. Reading an e-textbook on a laptop might not be as easy on the eyes, but most students already own a laptop — complete with a colour display. "The student laptop will prove a potent competitive entry barrier to other devices for reading e-textbooks," says Esposito. This is why NWMSU is also piloting e-textbooks on laptops among 500 students in 11 disciplines in an effort to compare how well students learn with e-readers, laptops and print textbooks.

9、That is probably a wise approach. Five years ago, devices such as the Kindle did not even exist. Which devices students will use for reading e-textbooks five years from now is anybody's guess — although many people are betting on some sort of convergent evolution among e-readers, laptops, portable music players and smart phones.

10、But device innovation has other implications as well. Just as the Internet brought dramatic change to the music industry, which relied on selling content on a physical medium, such as the CD, better devices could similarly disrupt the textbook industry. So it is not surprising that textbook publishers' embrace of e-textbooks is reminiscent of two scorpions mating.

11、Like the music industry, textbook publishers have been reluctant to put content online because of concerns about piracy, and the risk that it might undermine sales of their traditional print editions. If they are now willing to do so, it is largely because such concerns have been offset by the realization that e-textbooks may give them a way to cut into the largest threat to their profits: the huge market for second-hand textbooks.Thanks to the Internet, what was once the preserve of local used bookstores is now a vast and sophisticated international online market.

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