Are eTextbooks for everyone? Not necessarily.

As students start to buy their textbooks for this semester, a new utility – the eBook – is gaining substantial popularity and publicity.   However, there is one serious drawback that many eTextbook users have failed to consider – the open book exam. 

While eTextbooks offer some benefits, such as interactive learning and the ability to avoid carrying around heavy textbooks, there are two serious drawbacks for many college students. 

The first is price.   While an eTextbook, in many cases, is downloadable to a laptop, students will have to carry the laptop to their class, find a power outlet, and deal with the possibility that their expensive laptop could be destroyed while on campus.   If a student does not want to carry around their laptop, eReaders are available, but there are some drawbacks.  The first is that the eTextbook that a student downloads may not necessarily be compatible with all eTextbook readers.  While most will work, because of all of the emerging eTextbook companies, this could be problematic.   Furthermore, eTextbook readers are costly in and of themselves, with prices ranging from $100 - $300 or more.  Finally, eTextbooks are usually more expensive than buying, even new textbooks, within the secondary market.   A site like BookDefy compares textbook prices, and generally eTextbooks are 3 or 4 times the cost of what a student could – using BookDefy – find a new textbook for.  

The second drawback – and perhaps the most important – is the case of the open book exam.   When a student is allowed to use their textbook during an exam, most of the time professors will not allow a student to have any electronic equipment available while taking the test.   Therefore, students that use eTextbooks, either on a reader, or on a laptop, may be seriously disadvantaged if a professor offers them the ability to use their textbook while sitting for an exam.   Since computers and most readers not only allow students to store notes and other information, but connect to the Internet, it is doubtful that a professor would allow someone to use these devices – as it would be unfair to the other students that simply have a book.  Furthermore, a student can use an eTextbook (if the software allows it) to print off some chapters, but the added costs of paper, and the fact that a professor cannot guarantee that only the eTextbook information was printed may prevent the student from using this on an open book exam.   Finally, even if a professor did allow printing of an eTextbook, the costs – at an average of $0.10 per page to print, for a 300 or 400 page selection of the text would cost the student up to $40.   If they do this for the midterm and the final, spending $80 in total, the student will spend many times more than what they could have spent buying the textbook in the online market and using a textbook comparison site like BookDefy.

In short, while eTextbooks offer some great, enhanced content and other advantages, they will not necessarily save a savvy student any money, and the student may have to purchase a textbook anyway at either the midterm or the end of the semester – if a professor allows an open book exam.