[stylist] The Great E-Book Experiment:

[Allison Nastoff]

On the one hand, I love electronic textbooks.  As a blind college 
student, I have already made the switch to electronic textbooks, 
but many of them are not available electronically yet, so the 
disability services office has to scan them by hand or order them 
on tape.  I hope that over time many more books can be made 
available in electronic format.  This has sure saved shelf space 
and made my backpack lighter.  In elementary school, many of my 
books were in braille, which made my backpack load so heavy I 
used a suitcase instead of a backpack, which was kind of 
embarrassing (smile).
On the other hand, I do think there are some subjects where you 
really need to have a hard copy of the book in front of you.  
Courses like English or history where it is just reading straight 
text, electronic books would be okay, but it seems like it would 
be easier to understand the graphs and diagrams of courses like 
science and math when you have them right in front of you.  And 
in terms of the education of blind children, graphs can not be 
read on a computer, at least not that I know of.  (I will be 
using a traditional embossed braille book for Statistics in the 
fall.) While technology is becoming ever more important in this 
age, I still think it is important for children to know how to 
use both technology, and traditional books, for general 
knowledge, and as a backup system when there are computer 
problems.  Maybe use electronic books for high school and 
college, but teach children how to use traditional books in 
elementary school, and always have traditional books on hand as a 
backup.  While I am not against progress, I hope that this 
experiment procedes with caution.
Allison Nastoff

>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Everett Gavel" <e.gavel at sbcglobal.net
>To: "Blind Professional Journalists List" <journalists at nfbnet.org
>Date sent: Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:14:57 -0400
>Subject: [stylist] The Great E-Book Experiment:

>I thought this might be of interest to some of you.

>Strive On,
>Everett
>www.everettgavel.com


>From:
>THE BOOK MARKETING EXPERT NEWSLETTER! June 11, 2009
>Book Bits and Bites

>"The Great E-Book Experiment:"
>Strapped for cash, California is going to test e-books for select
>students/schools to see if it can save money as well as wear and 
tear on
>young bodies that currently lug around many heavy textbooks.  The 
CA
>experiment will be closely watched in the UK, which is 
considering a similar
>measure.
>See the Times online article
>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article
6466577.ece




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