Context is all important

By the time this article is published, the world of ebooks will have moved on again, I am sure. Already we hear anecdotally of undergraduates buying iPads and other tablet devices to take to University in the same way that the previous wave of students five years ago bought laptops as standard equipment. All the signs from the market-place are that ebooks are beginning to sell as well as physical books, at least in some areas of publishing. If nothing else, the miniscule luggage allowance by budget airlines has driven up the sales of e-holidayreading!

Marianne Barber

Our experiences of a trial implementation of eTextbooks at The College of Law should be placed in the context of the academic year 2010–11. Another important element in the background to this trial was that we were offering each of our Legal Practice Course students the chance to download for free individual ebook copies of their College of Law textbooks. (Perhaps more familiar to some as the large glossy books of the same titles that adorn the shelves of many a practitioner's library and are now also available to purchase as ebooks.) This was in addition to, not instead of the paper versions, which they are given as standard at the outset of their course. In other words, this was not about the loan of the ebook version of a standard text in the library, but rather an augmentation of their course materials (although the original was produced as a book complete with an ISBN.) This is why I have been careful to use the term “eTextbooks” to differentiate. As with any practical “lessons learnt” presentation, context is all. Before applying anything you read here, check how closely the set-up resembles your own.

Definitions

I should say at this point what I understand by an “eTextbook” and how it differs from an ebook. My definition would be that an eTextbook is an e-learning resource which is portable, customisable, navigable and possibly also “sociable”. In the model we had for this first year, the eTextbooks could be downloaded in one place and viewed in another with the same functionality and with all annotations synchronised immediately, regardless of whether the user is viewing them online or on a physical device.

Where an eTextbook perhaps differs from an ebook is that it is not designed to be read passively like a novel. It may contain a number of tables and diagrams in addition to text. Unlike an ebook purchased by or licensed to a library, there are no concurrent user or time-based limitations, other than the access expiry at the end of 12 months. As all of our Textbooks are revised each year, the hard copy is also replaced at 12 month intervals. For these reasons the eTextbooks are not integrated with library stock but issued directly to students via an email at the beginning of their course.

The Trial

Three separate organisations were involved – The College of Law, College Of Law Publishing (the independent company which publishes and sells the College's LPC textbooks) and their chosen platform provider for the trial, VitalSource. The parameters of the trial were as follows:

• • All teaching staff plus all full-time and part-time (year) LPC students to be included in the trial (around 4,000 in total);

• • eTextbook versions to be offered alongside the existing hard copy in addition to the pdf versions hosted on the Virtual Learning Environment;

• • 8 titles covering the 7 compulsory core subjects within the SRA syllabus, all published by College of Law Publishing, to be downloadable in a single file;

• • Platform to be provided by a 3^rd party (VitalSource) using their ebook software “Bookshelf™”;

• • eTextbooks available to read on a Mac or a PC, laptop or iPad as well as via the VitalSource website.

The model agreed on was that redemption codes would be generated and sent to us, to distribute to all LPC students and teaching staff (which we did using mailmerge.) A charge was to be levied for each code redeemed, rather than purchasing all the codes up front. (This is essential while the concept is being established and it mirrors the purchasing of ebooks on sites like Amazon, where you pay at the point of download.)

As part of the “Innovation, Production and Design” group at the College of Law, and as an experienced manager in terms of implementing new electronic resources, I was asked to see the trial through. No matter how far in advance you try to plan for summer jobs in an academic setting, the arrival of the last week before the new intake always seems to creep up on you unawares! In the case of eTextbooks you are at the mercy of the course design schedule and the desire to go right to the wire in terms of having the most up-to-date information included. As this was a trial year we were also waiting for the go-ahead for the licensing arrangements. This meant that the email to students containing their redemption codes went out towards the end of the first week of term by which time students on intensive one year courses like the LPC are already sifting out emails into what they judge to be “essential” and “non-essential”. When we surveyed students about their use of the eTextbooks the following April many of them said they “would have been interested if [they] had known about them” (a perennial problem with students about all sorts of things, not just ebooks!) It is something we have already re-thought for the re-run in 2011.

Rationale

We had already done some research into the desirability and effectiveness of eTextbooks and their potential as innovative learning technology. More immediately, offering them to students would enhance the world class resources we already provide. This is especially valuable to those who are increasingly opting to study part-time or by distance learning. Even in 2010 there was evidence that ebooks and eReaders were beginning to take off and we wanted to be at the cutting edge of this development. Added to that, VitalSource were prepared to waive the platform cost for the first year of the trial.

Functionality of Bookshelf™

The welcome screen allows you to see not only the list of titles but also various sub-sets such as those with notes or “recently viewed”. Digital Rights Management is very clear at the next screen; hovering over a title gives a pop-up box showing when your access expires (12 months to the minute from when the books were first downloaded), how many pages you may print off at a time as well as the usual bibliographical detail; author, ISBN etc. (Just as a paperback edition of a book carries a separate ISBN from the hardback, digital editions must have their own ISBN.) After that you can navigate via a contents tab, search throughout the whole book or use arrows on the right-hand edge to “turn” the page. Switching to the “Notes” tab, you can select text and add a note, which will appear on the contents tab view as a post-it, and/or choose a category of highlight, such as “clarify with tutor” or “important”. The categories are customisable; choose what you want to label them and assign one of the usual highlighting colours.

These are all fairly standard features and you should expect to find them in some guise, whichever ebook publisher you are working with. Bookshelf™ also offers “social” features. Notes and highlights can be shared by students with a study companion, workshop group or by a tutor or between tutors preparing to teach as a team. This can be set up in advance or done by invitation, providing those you're intending to share with have allowed sharing from their books. Permission needs to be given for each category of highlight so you could choose to share some and not others. You can also choose “by invitation only” or “share with anyone”. There's even an option to “rate this person's notes”! (Slightly more alarming is the button to “Edit friends”.) Once the invitees have registered and agreed to share, whenever you open your books you also see the other person(s) notes etc listed underneath yours on the left-hand menu.

Accessibility features include the ability to change the colour of the background, as well as that of the font, on both text and diagrams.

Logistics and Support

A dedicated email address was set up to distribute the email to students and receive feed-back and requests for help. FAQs already existed on the VitalSource website and we added our own to a specially created library page to cover issues such as open-book exams (where electronic devices are not permitted.) By downloading the books myself and playing with them I became the in-house expert, simply by being ahead of the curve, and was able to respond to some of the queries that came through.

We had allowed for a few “spare” redemption codes for late joiners and entered their names on the spreadsheet as the codes were allocated. One student contacted us a few weeks into the term to say that her laptop had been stolen after she had downloaded her ebooks onto it and was there anything we could do to help since she was already very attached to them. Since we were fairly sure that not all the codes would be redeemed and we would only be charged for the ones we used it was no problem to give her a new code. One slight drawback we did encounter was that having directed students to call a free-phone number advertised on the VitalSource website for “24/7 help” we discovered that this number was only available in the US. (VitalSource have since promised to look into this.)

Results and observations

As a broad overall conclusion, bearing in mind this relates to September 2010, a small number of students were extremely pleased with the eTextbooks but the majority were at best luke-warm. Those who viewed them positively were grateful for the difference it had made. Some of the more detailed feedback came from part-time students who cited the juggling act between home, work and study as the reason they valued the portability of the books compared to the hard copy (weighing around 9 kilos for the set.) Some comments supported the view that budget airlines have indeed done more for the cause of ebooks than anything else! It was clear that these types of student are more likely to possess an iPad than the twenty-somethings which make up the majority of LPC students; although this situation may already be changing, as mentioned at the top of this article.

Regarding the relatively low take-up (185 downloads in the first week but overall only about 400) there were several possible reasons for this, as evidenced by the user survey conducted by our Marketing Research department. Some preferred to use the pdf versions as they were already on our VLE and didn't require any additional effort to obtain them. A few were apprehensive that endorsing the ebooks would be a vote against the hard copy. For most it was clearly a change too far. Law students are probably more wedded than most to book reading in traditional format. Without widespread ownership of iPads, their experience of the ebooks would be as close reading from a vertical computer screen, which for more than a small amount of study is tiring and likely to be less conducive to learning. (It is my personal belief that only a portable device which operates in the same plane as a physical book – ie horizontally - offers an acceptable e-reading experience). The question of double annotating also came up. For obvious reasons, electronic devices are not allowed in open-book exams, which is currently an obstacle to greater take-up. You could, I suppose, argue that having to mark up both the “e” version and the paper provides an additional opportunity to consolidate knowledge.