E-texts and e-books and e-readers are becoming ubiquitous. Those of us who grew up with books are probably going to be more resistant to the onslaught, and we needn’t fear that printed books are going to disappear, but already we’ve lost many hundreds of independent bookshops due to online booksellers and now, the e-text revolution.

Amazon recently added “real” page numbers to their Kindle reader, so that one can now have a correspondence between a printed text and its electronic equivalent. This is useful for students who want to use an e-reader but who need to cite the text, especially as the professor will probably have assigned printed, published books for the course.

Take the concept of a page, for example. A page is a block of content divided by what “fits” into a given physical space. If you’ve ever done an essay for a course, you’ve probably changed the amount of content on a page by changing the line spacing or changing the font size. But the page itself rarely represents a semantic break in the content. That is, a page is a page not because it makes sense for the content itself, but because that’s just what happened to fit. (Inkling website)

Exactly–and that’s going to be a problem in classrooms because not every student will be equipped with an e-reader, and those who are, will have different ones. How do you standardize a textbook so that page 245 (or line 3200) in one e-text file is in the same place in another format and reader? How do you cite e-text?

I haven’t even tried an e-reader yet. I just keep ordering books, weighty books which arrive days after I place the order (but an ebook would download in a minute). I like books, but the day when students will be bringing e-readers to class, or reading the text on their laptops, isn’t far off–if it hasn’t already begun…see this Newsweek article.

While Amazon,  Barnes and Noble, and Chapters/Indigo have reduced prices for most of their e-books, and there are, of course, tens of thousands of free (pre-1923) books, many university publishers, such as the University of California, are still charging printed-text prices on many of their e-titles. The University of Chicago Press offers better prices on downloadable books; each month they offer one title for free.

Of special note is the latest version of Kate L. Turabian’s Student’s Guide to Writing College Papers (fourth edition) which is available from the University of Chicago Press as an e-book: the hardcover version is 39.00, the paperback and ebook retail for 15.00, or only 7.00 if you want a time-limited version (30 day license).

Kobois wi-fi enabled, allowing uploads of library books, epub and pdf files (Chapters/Indigo and Borders). More details here. Barnes and Noble's Nook now offers a full-color screen as well as the greyscale version. Apple has its iPads, but there is an issue of eyestrain, with extended reading using an LCD screen, compared with the e-ink screens of the other readers. But that hasn't deterred a San Francisco developer/publisher, Inkling, which is making textbooks interactive--on the iPad (see update below).Comparisons of the leading eReaders.

For the collection of pdf files–especially scientific papers, but applicable to any kind, Papers (for Mac users) is a great application, letting you browse, download, organize, search, print, annotate and otherwise deal with the hundreds of articles you collect.

While e-reader compatibility, annotation and citation issues have yet to be worked out,  this revolution, and the challenges it poses for academia, is going to be in the classroom, and on the faculty agenda, sooner rather than later.

Beyond e-text is the fusing of text and film/video both online and in ebooks. See Filmic Texts and the Rise of the Fifth Estate, and Learning from You Tube.

iPad 2 ad ©Apple.

**UPDATE January 2012: The article above was written in March 2011 and 10 months later it’s already out of date: Apple introduced this month (in this video) free apps to create e-texts (iBooks in their lingo) for the iPad (and iPhone, iPod, and whatever else they come up with). The apps (iBook Author, iTunesU), are free, the iPad starts at $500, which puts another burden on already cash-strapped students and parents. However, it could be argued that one iPad costs about the same as three or four textbooks. You can’t fault them for their marketing genius (even with Steve Jobs gone): a resources page is full of helpful, Apple-oriented tips and programs.