CNBC reporting:
The Inkling digital books use the touch technology on the Apple iPad to allow students to interact with the text, and other content. The students can digitally highlight material and make notes, in the same they would with a pen, but then those notes can be shared with others in the class.
"If I understand something and my friend doesn't, I can help explain to it to her and it reinforces it to me," says freshman Courtney Richardson. "You obviously can't get that in a traditional textbook."
For associate professor Ian Shepherd, the students' notes in the text provided real-time feedback on what they were absorbing in class and what they were missing.
"It allows me to focus on coming up with a new application that perhaps is more relevant to a student," he says. "It has reinvigorated my love for teaching."
ACU students were given the iPads for this year's pilot program. After using them, three-quarters of freshman say they'd be willing to buy their own tablets, if at least half of their textbooks were available on the iPad.
A national study from the Pearson Foundation also found students with tablets overwhelmingly prefer digital texts, the first sign of students embracing e-books in a couple of years of the college surveys.
...
While students in college today are very attached to their mobile devices, they have not been enamored of e-books. In 2010, digital books accounted for just 3 percent of textbooks sales according to the National Association of College Stores.
Analysts say it's because until now e-textbooks have been little more little more than PDF copies of physical books, impractical for students who are accustomed to highlighting their paper copies as they study.
Researchers at online education firm Xplana say the shift toward tablets in the year ahead will jumpstart demand for e-texbooks in the $8 billion U.S. education book market.
"iPads and other tablets will be in the possession of about 20 percent of college students by the fall of 2012," says Xplana director of research Rob Reynolds. "That's a huge impact. It's fastest growing technology that we've seen in education."
Reynolds predicts digital book sale growth in the higher education market
will double over the next four years to $1.5 billion by 2015, and account for 25 percent market share.http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-06-17-digital-textbooks_n.htm
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