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Why eReaders Aren't in Schools
There's a post over at GoodEreader, called The Vision Problem – Why eReaders Are Not Widely Adopted in Public Schools, in which it is claimed that the reason schools haven't adopted ereaders en masse is those awful disability-activist groups that insist that if there are two blind kids in a school who can't use a Kindle, nobody gets to have one:
Aside from the overt ablism--which I'm so not up to screaming about right now--the author is missing the point. Ereaders aren't avoided by schools because "whenever they try, advocacy groups representing disabled people shut them down," which is what the article says.
Ereaders aren't promoted in schools because ereaders are lousy for academic use. And all the new bells-and-whistles being added aren't helping that one bit.
Ereaders are great for reading novels. Wonderful for it. I can't stand to read stories on paper anymore; I love the ability to change font size when my eyes are tired or the light is dim; love having my next six stories lined up when I'm done with this one; love the one-hand click-button to change pages. But I've tried using it for research and study, and it's awful; it'd be worse if I had papers to write.
Navigating back and forth between chapters is a pain. There's no one-click, "gimme TOC" button on my reader; not sure there is on any of them. And of course, that only works if the publisher has placed navigable chapters in the ebook, and since there are no page numbers, a list consisting of links to "Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3" is nowhere near as useful as it is in a paper book, where you can see that Chapter 7 begins on page 113 and Chapter 8 begins on page 120, so 7 must've been that tiny chapter.
Support for images and charts ranges from bad to pathetic. There's only so much you can do with a 6" or 7" screen, which is most ereaders. (IPad's different. But the iPad is not an ereader; it's a full-function tablet, and nobody's suggesting mass distribution of $450 devices to students.) (The iPad still has problems as an academic ereader.) Many ereaders don't have a zoom for pictures; when they do, they're still limited to the original picture resolution... zooming into a 200dpi scan of the United States doesn't make the names of the capitols any clearer. E-ink readers, by far the cheapest, are black and white only. (There's a color one. It's $800 and sold only in Korea.) No color photos; no color-coded charts or tables.
Ability to switch between *books* is pathetic. Very few readers have a list of "most recently opened" books, and even with those, it's an awkward jump back and forth. There is no way to set, "I want to read chapter 8 of this, then chapter 3 of that, then chapter 12 of this other thing--and then read them all again to compare what they said."
Bookmarking's limited. You can make a bookmark; you can't make different *kinds* of bookmarks. With pbooks, you can put yellow flags on the "important fact" pages, and pink ones on "quote from this" and green ones on "find a refutation for this." Or you can write on the post-its to tell them apart.
Annotation's limited, sometimes nonexistent. Highlighting and notes are two separate things in ereaders.
That's all software issues. I believe the navigation problems are the worst--it's just *hard* to flip around in an ebook; there isn't any "go back to that section I read, about the winter crop storage." Some of them have searchability (for some formats of books, if the book's well-made), but searchability won't get you "that passage about the really cold winter" in a book that's already full of weather and agriculture info. In a pbook, you remember that was "about a quarter of the way in;" ebook searches don't work that way. And there's no "flip through all the pages, at half a second each, until I see the one I remember."
Moving on from software: Availability of books.
Most textbooks don't have ebook formats; those that do, often have them as weirdly-DRM'd PDFs. For many of them, you must be connected to their server at all times to read it--with a computer, not an ereader. Those that are unlocked--O'Reilly sells tech manuals with no DRM--are often PDFs, not formatted for ereaders.
Even if the book's available as an ebook, in mobi and epub formats so they work on several kinds of ereaders... with ebooks, unlike print, the store you get it from may affect the features of the book. Ignoring the DRM issues (don't get me started), there's no page numbers; the teacher can't say, "turn to page 37." It's "turn to chapter 3, paragraph 8, unless your version puts the photo and caption ahead of that paragraph, in which case, paragraph 9."
Ebooks from different stores might even be different *versions*. The Amazon one may have "extra bonus essay" at the end; the Nook version might not have been updated with that. Ebook copies of classics, coming from different sources, can have small formatting differences (early Gutenberg versions may have skipped the italics entirely), may-or-may-not include chapter titles, may have typos that got corrected later, or by a different publisher. To make ebooks work for a classroom, someone probably has to confirm that all the students are using the same exact edition.
Publishers would love this; students and their parents would not. Why should they have to pay for the Macmillan edition of the Declaration of Independence And Other Great American Documents, when they're all downloadable free at Project Gutenberg? Or Manybooks.net?
Logistics... if the public school students have to buy their own books, there'll be solid demand to allow them to buy whatever version they can get cheaply, including "finding someone who'll scan a used paperback for them, for free." If the school buys the books, they have to arrange contracts; normally, ebook purchases aren't transferable. The school can't just bop over to Amazon.com, pay for 30 copies of "The Great Gatsby," and hand them out to 30 students.
And then we get to hardware. It's only recently that ereaders have been remotely in the price range that one could consider assigning them to students in districts where the average income is less than $200k/year. The cheapest decent-quality ereaders are now less than $100 each; a school might be able to arrange a bundle of them at $60 each. (I have doubts about this, 'cos I think Amazon's $80 price is cutting their profits to a hair; they expect to make it up on sales.) But even so... $80/student is a potentially do-able expense for some schools.
Are those loaned, or give out? If they're loaned for the year, how does the school cope with the inevitable losses and breakages? ("Charge the family" isn't enough of a policy. What happens when one is broken, and the family admits that their kid is just clumsy--or possibly disabled in some way--and can't be required to keep hardware safe? What does the school do about bullies who deliberately break other kids' ereaders?) If they're loaned, what does the school do about the handful of kids whose families just buy them ereaders--and the upgraded version, or a different company's reader?
(Insert obligatory DRM rant here. Kids who've bought a Nook can't download the school-sanctioned Kindle versions.)
What does the school do about the wifi that's built into so many ereaders? If there's no wifi allowed; the school has to train everyone in how to load books onto the reader. If there is, the school has to deal with kids tweeting on their kindles.
What does the school do when they get the ereaders back at the end of the year, and find out how much porn has been bouncing around among junior high students?
These are not unsolvable problems. For every semi-rhetorical question, I can think of half a dozen ways the problems could be addressed. But these, and other issues, need to be considered before any school can shift the majority of its reading expectations to mobile devices. It's not a matter of "those annoying blind kids are holding back progress for everyone." Ereaders aren't ready for widespread academic use, and until the hardware/software manufacturers seriously looks at academic needs for reading--not just "how many dollars do schools and students normally spend on books"--ereaders will remain a classroom novelty, not a standard tool.
Honestly, you figure that the average school might have roughly one or two kids out of the entire student body that has severe vision problems. There is also a number of dyslectic kids in the school system too, you would figure that a few students would not limit wide-spread adoption. These few students are all represented by a number of very large organizations that take their rights very seriously. Last month the National Federation of the Blind filed a court motion against the Sacramento Public Library Authority because the library was lending NOOK e-readers preloaded with ebooks to its patrons.(Plz to ignore the grammar/spelling errors in the quote; not my fault.)
Aside from the overt ablism--which I'm so not up to screaming about right now--the author is missing the point. Ereaders aren't avoided by schools because "whenever they try, advocacy groups representing disabled people shut them down," which is what the article says.
Ereaders aren't promoted in schools because ereaders are lousy for academic use. And all the new bells-and-whistles being added aren't helping that one bit.
Ereaders are great for reading novels. Wonderful for it. I can't stand to read stories on paper anymore; I love the ability to change font size when my eyes are tired or the light is dim; love having my next six stories lined up when I'm done with this one; love the one-hand click-button to change pages. But I've tried using it for research and study, and it's awful; it'd be worse if I had papers to write.
Navigating back and forth between chapters is a pain. There's no one-click, "gimme TOC" button on my reader; not sure there is on any of them. And of course, that only works if the publisher has placed navigable chapters in the ebook, and since there are no page numbers, a list consisting of links to "Chapter 1 - Chapter 2 - Chapter 3" is nowhere near as useful as it is in a paper book, where you can see that Chapter 7 begins on page 113 and Chapter 8 begins on page 120, so 7 must've been that tiny chapter.
Support for images and charts ranges from bad to pathetic. There's only so much you can do with a 6" or 7" screen, which is most ereaders. (IPad's different. But the iPad is not an ereader; it's a full-function tablet, and nobody's suggesting mass distribution of $450 devices to students.) (The iPad still has problems as an academic ereader.) Many ereaders don't have a zoom for pictures; when they do, they're still limited to the original picture resolution... zooming into a 200dpi scan of the United States doesn't make the names of the capitols any clearer. E-ink readers, by far the cheapest, are black and white only. (There's a color one. It's $800 and sold only in Korea.) No color photos; no color-coded charts or tables.
Ability to switch between *books* is pathetic. Very few readers have a list of "most recently opened" books, and even with those, it's an awkward jump back and forth. There is no way to set, "I want to read chapter 8 of this, then chapter 3 of that, then chapter 12 of this other thing--and then read them all again to compare what they said."
Bookmarking's limited. You can make a bookmark; you can't make different *kinds* of bookmarks. With pbooks, you can put yellow flags on the "important fact" pages, and pink ones on "quote from this" and green ones on "find a refutation for this." Or you can write on the post-its to tell them apart.
Annotation's limited, sometimes nonexistent. Highlighting and notes are two separate things in ereaders.
That's all software issues. I believe the navigation problems are the worst--it's just *hard* to flip around in an ebook; there isn't any "go back to that section I read, about the winter crop storage." Some of them have searchability (for some formats of books, if the book's well-made), but searchability won't get you "that passage about the really cold winter" in a book that's already full of weather and agriculture info. In a pbook, you remember that was "about a quarter of the way in;" ebook searches don't work that way. And there's no "flip through all the pages, at half a second each, until I see the one I remember."
Moving on from software: Availability of books.
Most textbooks don't have ebook formats; those that do, often have them as weirdly-DRM'd PDFs. For many of them, you must be connected to their server at all times to read it--with a computer, not an ereader. Those that are unlocked--O'Reilly sells tech manuals with no DRM--are often PDFs, not formatted for ereaders.
Even if the book's available as an ebook, in mobi and epub formats so they work on several kinds of ereaders... with ebooks, unlike print, the store you get it from may affect the features of the book. Ignoring the DRM issues (don't get me started), there's no page numbers; the teacher can't say, "turn to page 37." It's "turn to chapter 3, paragraph 8, unless your version puts the photo and caption ahead of that paragraph, in which case, paragraph 9."
Ebooks from different stores might even be different *versions*. The Amazon one may have "extra bonus essay" at the end; the Nook version might not have been updated with that. Ebook copies of classics, coming from different sources, can have small formatting differences (early Gutenberg versions may have skipped the italics entirely), may-or-may-not include chapter titles, may have typos that got corrected later, or by a different publisher. To make ebooks work for a classroom, someone probably has to confirm that all the students are using the same exact edition.
Publishers would love this; students and their parents would not. Why should they have to pay for the Macmillan edition of the Declaration of Independence And Other Great American Documents, when they're all downloadable free at Project Gutenberg? Or Manybooks.net?
Logistics... if the public school students have to buy their own books, there'll be solid demand to allow them to buy whatever version they can get cheaply, including "finding someone who'll scan a used paperback for them, for free." If the school buys the books, they have to arrange contracts; normally, ebook purchases aren't transferable. The school can't just bop over to Amazon.com, pay for 30 copies of "The Great Gatsby," and hand them out to 30 students.
And then we get to hardware. It's only recently that ereaders have been remotely in the price range that one could consider assigning them to students in districts where the average income is less than $200k/year. The cheapest decent-quality ereaders are now less than $100 each; a school might be able to arrange a bundle of them at $60 each. (I have doubts about this, 'cos I think Amazon's $80 price is cutting their profits to a hair; they expect to make it up on sales.) But even so... $80/student is a potentially do-able expense for some schools.
Are those loaned, or give out? If they're loaned for the year, how does the school cope with the inevitable losses and breakages? ("Charge the family" isn't enough of a policy. What happens when one is broken, and the family admits that their kid is just clumsy--or possibly disabled in some way--and can't be required to keep hardware safe? What does the school do about bullies who deliberately break other kids' ereaders?) If they're loaned, what does the school do about the handful of kids whose families just buy them ereaders--and the upgraded version, or a different company's reader?
(Insert obligatory DRM rant here. Kids who've bought a Nook can't download the school-sanctioned Kindle versions.)
What does the school do about the wifi that's built into so many ereaders? If there's no wifi allowed; the school has to train everyone in how to load books onto the reader. If there is, the school has to deal with kids tweeting on their kindles.
What does the school do when they get the ereaders back at the end of the year, and find out how much porn has been bouncing around among junior high students?
These are not unsolvable problems. For every semi-rhetorical question, I can think of half a dozen ways the problems could be addressed. But these, and other issues, need to be considered before any school can shift the majority of its reading expectations to mobile devices. It's not a matter of "those annoying blind kids are holding back progress for everyone." Ereaders aren't ready for widespread academic use, and until the hardware/software manufacturers seriously looks at academic needs for reading--not just "how many dollars do schools and students normally spend on books"--ereaders will remain a classroom novelty, not a standard tool.