A National Association of College Stores Foundation survey conducted this past fall at 19 campuses nationwide reveals that 74% of students surveyed still prefer to use a printed textbook when taking a class. These results really shouldn’t be a surprise considering that at our present state of ereader development a digital textbook does not offer anything more than a traditional text. Furthermore, when you consider the limited annotation abilities of most ereaders, digital texts offer less than traditional texts.
With the release of the iPad and the explosive growth in the iPad App development community we may start to see progress soon on the development of dynamic and interactive tools necessary to provide a rich experience with digital texts.
