eBooks - or not.

I've long been an advocate of e-Books.  I've pushed for us to adopt them in my district.  As an avid reader, I've dropped serious coin on books most of my life - I've got hundreds of them on shelves at home, and a couple hundred more from Kindle or the Apple Store (mostly Kindle, but I don't have a rational reason for why), and contrary to @anotherschwab's belief, I've read them all!

I've often said that books have their place.  But now I'm rethinking that.  Some.

I've bought enough eBooks to actually pay for a Kindle reader and an iPad, using the differential between the cost of an electronic copy of a book over the cost of the same book in paperback or hardback to make the calculation.  Yeah, I know - I don't actually own the book electronically, I just have a license to read the thing on my device - I can't really share it, give it away, or sell it back to a used book store.  In the end I don't care - having a hundred good books on a tablet, being able to port that wherever I go, and jump into a book (any book) whenever I want is, well, really cool.  And since I generally read multiple books at a time, it's also really convenient.

It's also convenient to know I have access to all those books on all of my devices.  Sitting in a meeting, pulling up something as a reference, and being able to search for that specific passage in that specific book is huge.  You can't do that with a book - unless you're meeting in a really good library!

The vision of empowering kids with this same vision - having all of their books on demand on a mobile device - is compelling to me.  Watching kids lug home a backpack full of textbooks is painful. Buying two copies of each textbook so they don't have to do that is unreasonable.  Let's quit killing trees, I say!

Last week I had the chance to visit an 8th grade class at a rural school I work with in northern California.  Every student there has a mobile device (a laptop), and teachers are becoming better and better at integrating them into their classrooms.  This particular 8th grade class was reading Frankenstein.  What I noticed when I visited was that some of the kids were reading on their netbooks, and some were reading a book - the teacher had given them the choice.  I just had to know what the kids thought about this - so I asked them. What I learned was interesting.

The vast majority of kids preferred reading a physical book over the same book (literally identical - everything is the same online as in the physical book) on their computer.  Their reasons were compelling.  I anticipated some nostalgic, emotional attachment to the feel, smell, and comfort of an actual book (I hear that a lot, mostly from adults).  But that wasn't their reasoning.

A number of kids said when they read online, they felt eye strain.  Some complained of getting headaches.  Many said the experience detracted from following the story - using the cursor to click an arrow and wait for the next page disrupted the flow of the story, and they didn't enjoy it as much.  Likewise, the clicking and waiting made it cumbersome to flip back a page or two to re-read a passage when they missed an element that became important to the story.  Some students worried about the effects of "blue light" and "radiation" - and I asked them to research that and see if these issues are true on modern led displays - I'm still waiting for their findings.

Now, these kids were reading from a netbook.  A good one (Acer B113), with a good screen.  But a netbook nevertheless.  And I'm not sure, if they had an eReader or a tablet that they would find the experience as detracting - I'm still leaning towards the contention that the experience is superior on a tablet to an actual book, but it appears these kids would disagree.  Some actually own Nooks, tablets, and Kindles - and they still say they prefer a book.

But the other thing that a number of kids mentioned, I wasn't anticipating.  They spend all day, every day, on their devices, using them for their assignments and schoolwork, for communicating and social networking, and for the myriad other things we do with them - making a phone call, for example.  Sometimes, they say, it's just nice to unplug and read an old-fashioned book!

As school leaders, we should take pause and listen to the kids.  Taking away their books, at least completely, may not be all that wise a decision.  Or, at least, we should be very careful about the device and the manner in which we migrate away from physical books.  After talking with the students at Grenada, I'm convinced that laptops are not a good replacement for a book.  I'm still holding out that tablets can be a viable alternative - but now, before I'd advocate that, I'd pilot it with some students.  And get their take.  Which brings up another thought - the devices themselves.  There's not a single device that meets all their needs.  I'm now thinking kids need both a laptop and a tablet (or eReader).  But that's an expensive proposition, and a thought for another post.