Col­lege text­books are going dig­i­tal! Declan But­ler, a senior reporter at Nature asks how this will shake up stu­dent read­ing habits and the multi-billion-dollar print text­book market:

The rum­ble of text­books thump­ing on to the desks of a uni­ver­sity lec­ture the­atre, the rus­tle of turn­ing pages, the groan of back­pack straps hoist­ing 10 kilo­grams of text­books — these sounds may soon be an echo of the past. This semes­ter, 1,200 stu­dents at the Uni­ver­sity of Texas at Austin (UTA) are fore­go­ing printed text­books in a pilot trial of Ama­zon Kin­dle e-readers stuffed with texts in elec­tronic form.

But­ler, D. (2009). Tech­nol­ogy: The text­book of the future Nature, 458 (7238), 568 – 570 DOI: 10.1038/458568a

20th April, 2009