The Textbook Of The Future

摘要

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.rn"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 theyrnrethink their decades-old model of massive, printed tomes sold at premium prices.