The Use of E-Books in Higher Education: A Balanced Perspective

The Use of E-Books in Higher Education: A Balanced Perspective

By Divine Agodzo

Over the last decade, e-books have emerged as one of the most significant technological innovations in the educational sector. Without doubt, the growing adoption of e-books in higher education has revolutionary implications for teaching and learning. This essay briefly discusses this trend and provides an overview of relevant research on e-book use in college-level education. It will also consider the case in favor of and against e-books and argue that on balance, e-books promise more benefits than burdens to the learning project and should be embraced by educators.

One of the earliest initiatives to digitize books for academic use was Project Guttenberg (Polanka, 2011). Project Guttenberg founder Michael Hart, credited with the invention of e-books in 1971, set about to create “the world’s first digitized library” (Lebert, 2004). Since then, several innovators have built on this vision, including Google, which launched the Google Print Library Project (Google Books, for short) in 2004. Although not without controversy, Google’s partnership with institutions such as Cambridge University Press, Harvard University and the University of Michigan to digitize and publish their library collections was a significant step towards legitimizing e-books in academia. Other smaller scale projects provided further early endorsement of e-books in higher education, including the University of Texas at Austin’s contract with NetLibrary in 1999 and Pennsylvania State University’s Sony E-Book Reader Project (Polanka, 2011).

Some educators and librarians have hailed e-books as a welcome complement to print texts (Polanka, 2012) and most university libraries continue to invest in e-book collections. Academic libraries in the U.S. recognized as leaders in the e-book revolution include the Stanford University Engineering Library, the University of Texas at San Antonio Applied Technology and Engineering Library, and the University of Texas at Austin Undergraduate Library (Polanka, 2012). The Stanford University Engineering Library, for example, is well on its way to becoming a bookless library that only houses digital collections (Stanford News, 2010).

Various studies have been conducted investigating the use and preference (or otherwise) of e-books in comparison to print texts. In their study of e-book use by graduate students and faculty at the San Houston State University, Cassidy, Martinez and Shen (2012) found that 38% of respondents had used the library’s e-books. Of those who had not yet used e-books, graduate students were much more likely to give them a try in future (68%) than faculty (47%), suggesting a greater reticence by university professors to embrace e-books than their students.

In a two-year longitudinal study of students at the Suffolk University Sawyer Business School, Weisberg (2011) documented a shift in initial attitudes towards digital books over time, from perceptions that there were unsuitable for university studies to increasing acceptance and eventual preference over print texts. Staiger (2012) reviewed 24 studies conducted between 2006 and 2011 on e-book use in post-secondary institutions around the world. He found that roughly 50% of participants, on aggregate, had used e-books.

E-books present several benefits to students and ongoing improvements in technology will likely continue to increase their appeal. One study (Kiriakova, Okamoto, Zubarev, & Gross, 2010) found that 84.5% of students preferred an e-book reader to print books because the former was more fun, portable, and easier to use. E-books that are searchable can significantly assist students in locating and retrieving pertinent material for research and features such as the ability to add notes, highlight material, and extract citations can all facilitate academic work. There are benefits for academic publishing as well – electronic publishing makes it easier for scholars to publish or revise subject content and research findings. Given all of this, it is not surprising that several leading universities have been promoting e-books, as the foregoing discussion has shown.

On the other hand, there are some in the academic community who worry that adoption of e-books may lead to inferior scholarship. Staiger (2012) laments that students use, rather than read, e-books, making a distinction between the practice of reading and referencing. The closest students come to reading is the habit of power-browsing through e-texts, “they do not immerse themselves in them for extended periods of time in order to grasp their overall argument and point of view” (Staiger, 2012, p. 357). Given this, he votes strongly in favor of print books over their electronic counterparts:
Because of the central and often cherished role the [print] book has historically played in scholarly life, let alone in our culture more generally, the prospect that it may be replaced by a novel technology that makes cursory and spotty practices easier and more likely cannot but worry anybody who cares about the continuing vitality of that life. (Staiger, 2012, 361)

But the verdict on e-book use in academia is not that clear-cut. In spite of his criticism, Staiger (2012) also acknowledges that students may in fact be using the same spotty practices he attributes to e-books in their engagement with print texts and that further research is needed to draw a definitive conclusion. Research by Weisberg (2011) discovered no significant difference in learning outcomes between students who used e-textbooks and those who used print textbooks. In addition, Connell, Bayliss, and Farmer (2012) found that although e-book readers went through the content more slowly than print book readers, the overall comprehension of both groups of readers was the same.

Clearly, there are strong arguments that can be made for and against e-books and this essay has only discussed a few. Traditional bibliophiles point to various features of print books, including their tangibility, artistry, and rich literary heritage among reasons they consider them superior to e-books (Conrad, 2008). While these are rather subjective arguments, they have some worth. The concern that e-books may simply be used, rather than read, is one that educators need to be conscious of (although this is less likely to happen with e-textbooks that serve as core reading for a course, as opposed to use for supplementary research). There will be learners who prefer print textbooks (for example those with tactile or kinesthetic learning styles) so educators and librarians will need to accommodate the print format side-by-side with e-books in their curricula and catalogues. For this reason, while the Stanford University Engineering Library’s vision of an all-digital archive is a bold and interesting experiment, it should not serve as a universal model for university libraries.

This notwithstanding, the proliferation of e-books in academic instruction will no doubt continue. The divide between students’ use of media technology for social communication and entertainment and their use for academic work will continue to narrow. As research has shown, print-oriented students who try e-books may eventually begin to accept and even prefer them (Weisberg 2011). Educators must not stand in the way of this wave of change. Instead, they must capitalize on it. E-books, like every other form of technological innovation, have their potential downsides. But if the pros and cons were to be placed on a scale, in the opinion of this writer, the pros would outweigh the cons.

References

Cassidy, E. D., Martinez, M., & Shen, L. (2012). Not in love, or not in the know? Graduate
student and faculty use (and non-use) of e-books. Journal of Academic Librarianship, 38(6), 326-332. doi: 10.1016/j.acalib.2012.08.005

Connell, C., Bayliss, L., & Farmer, W. (2012). Effects of ebook readers and tablet computers on
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Conrad, P. (2008, July 27). It made me feel alienated from the books I know well. The Observer.
Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/27/ebooks

Kiriakova, M., Okamoto, K., Zubarev, M., & Gross, G. (2010). Aiming at a moving target: Pilot
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Lebert, M. (2004). Michael Hart: Changing the world through e-books. Retrieved from
http://pge.rastko.net/about/marie_lebert

Polanka, S. (Ed.). (2011). No shelf required: E-books in libraries. Chicago, IL: American
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Polanka, S. (Ed.). (2012). No shelf required 2: Use and management of electronic books.
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Staiger, J. (2012). How e-books are used. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 51(4), 355-365.
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Stanford News (2010). 'Bookless' library at Stanford looks to the future. Retrieved from
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Weisberg, M. (2011). Student attitudes and behaviors towards digital textbooks. Publishing
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