The Facts: Electronic books, ebooks, have become fairly commonplace during the last five years.

Our Opinion: Ebooks are typically less expensive than their paper counterparts, but students have not really embraced the ‘technological advance.’ Web sites that promote them should not require their purchase and should instead make them optional. Despite all the complaints and cries of frustration at 11:59 p.m., WebAssign, Vista and Moodle have made parts of the homework and testing cycle easier for faculty and students. The sites effectively aggregate course materials and make it possible for nearly seamless collaboration between many students. In a day and age where the Internet is boss, they have become part of students’ lives, especially as an increasing number of classes move toward online offerings. One of the trends sites like these, and others, have ushered in is the move to ebooks. In the past five years, the sites have begun selling electronic copies of books – in some cases, the purchases are mandatory. The bookstore has also followed the trend, but to little student acclaim. Electronic books sound enlightened from an environmental perspective and they are usually less expensive than their traditional, paper counterparts. The problem for students, though, seems to lie at their very core, ebooks just aren’t the same. Some people would call it old fashioned or wonder if students are masochistic for carrying the additional weight of paper textbooks in their bags, but the additional cost and weight are in many ways justifiable. Some Web sites make the ebooks only available for the semester in which students are taking the class. In many educational realms, particularly in the sciences this isn’t desirable. Students who plan to enter professional realms or who simply want to keep their books would be out of luck. Other students have complained about ‘the feel,’ or lack thereof, of ebooks. Electronic novels, like those on products such as the Kindle, are read sequentially and the user interface does not have to be particularly accommodating. But the inability to easily ‘skip around’ in a textbook can make studying problematic. The truth of the matter is that students have not taken a liking to ebooks en masse. The lower price point and portability do not seem to compensate for the texture and ease of ink and paper. Classes that exclusively use ebooks should consider making paper copies available and, at the very least, not force students into electronic prose.