Have textbooks become a thing of the past?

Some college institutions have announced that they are experimenting with alternate forms of classroom technology to help support the Go Green Movement. Most recently, Princeton University released a press statement saying that they have joined with Amazon’s Kindle DX electronic reader pilot program in a conscience attempt to limit the amount of paper used on campus. Although Fairfield has not announced any plans to adopt Kindles yet, the recent  push towards increasing environmental consciousness on campus may mean we could soon see Kindles in our own classrooms.

“As much I am for the Go Green Movement, I think that it’s a little ridiculous that you don’t have the option to actually buy a printed copy of the textbook,” said Kerry Davies ’11. “What’s next — burning the textbooks?”

A Kindle reader is an electronic version of literature, which allows the user to scroll through pages that are being shown on a display screen. The Kindle DX electronic reader is a fairly new technology from Amazon, originally released on May 6, 2009. The DX version features an upgrade in the size of the display screen, which allows for the best quality display of textbooks and newspapers; as of July 2009, has over 300,000 books available to download.

The colleges are making the effort with the hopes of making a serious impact on the level of printed material used on campus. They think that the Kindle system will allow the students to condense their textbooks into one easy, portable device. However, this new stance on textbooks comes with some complaints from students.

At Princeton, students were concerned with the new media, especially future interactions with the textbooks. Many are used to have the capability to highlight, take notes and make important corrections or citations on the pages of the printed textbook. This can be helpful when it comes to studying for tests or reviewing for class.

Also, with the use of technology comes the concern of the possible malfunction of the device; what would students do if they could not access the information in their textbooks? Another topic of much discussion was the price of the actual device added on to the rest of the tuition bills.
While Fairfield has not announced plans to adopt Kindles for courses yet, many students agree with the concerns of Princeton students, saying that the motivation to save trees through the program was a good idea, but still wanted to voice their concerns.

Some students were concerned about how new the technology is. Chloe Ainley ’13, said, “Textbooks tend to be more expansive in bulk. However, Kindles are a new thing, which means they might malfunction more if all the bugs aren’t worked out.”

It seems the future of textbooks hangs in the balance. While some students support the use of the new environmentally-friendly technology, many are still against it.

In the next few months, we may see more universities and colleges take the initiative to switch to a more “green” media for learning.

At this point it’s unclear whether the new practice will catch on with more universities, but with the initiative illustrated by schools thus far, there may be the demise of textbooks  in the coming years.

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