[confusedcitizen]

Maybe I'm being a prude, or maybe it's just inertia, but does everyone have an easy time replacing a textbook with an electronic device? An argument can probably be made about how ever-advancing technology might make note-taking (and the like) easier, but I often have a hard time detaching myself from the (very) personal experience a book ends up being. I don't just mean the contents of it, but also the feel of having a book in your hand and it being a companion. So much so, that there are times when reflecting back to certain textbooks, I'm reminded of the how the book 'looked' and 'felt'. Almost like how face-to-face conversation differs from over-the-wire.

Do most people feel otherwise?

[forgottenpaswrd]

People have associations and feelings about the things they used in their lifes. That's human, we don't know it and like to feel that we are "rational"(witch we are too but in a higher level layer) but we associate the same Paulov dogs did.

I loved so much fried chicken I got a so badly indigestion that I don't like it anymore(my mind associated it with bad feelings, so much pain)

My grandpa gave me a book before dying, and that made that book (and to a lesser extent all books)special. My first girlfriend send me notes on a book. My family read a lot of books. I learn a lot from books, enjoyed some books a lot, and in general had good experiences with them.

But young people will have good experiences with ebooks-tablets as good as we had with books. Maybe their first girlfriends will send then furtive IM messages they will later remember later in life, whatever. They won't understand how we can use those old and stupid things that can't display movies or read text.

They will have children with different devices and we will die and nobody will use books anymore.

[ezy]

My feeling is that, if I could have an electronic version that you could mark up appropriately -- I would start to get the same feeling about the personalized electronic copy as well.

However, there is one huge problem with textbooks on things like an iPad, that I've already run into in other contexts, and it has nothing to do with feel, or annotation (which still sucks on an ipad): You can't have more than one book open at one time. Not multitasking in the ipad sense, but literally, two ipads. Can't do it unless you spend another $600.

My feeling is that these device are the future, but two(three) things need to happen -- you need to be able to write/draw on these just as well as you can on paper (or close to it). And they need to be dirt cheap enough that everyone has three of them handy (and can have them communicate seamlessly).