Digital Libraries: Shifting the Landscape

This article describes the effort to digitize the world's books and speculates on the educational possibilities of ebooks. Educational institutions are hard at work with tech companies like Google at digitizing and making electronically available tens of thousands of books. The article describes the burgeoning usability of ebook readers - since this article was written in 2009, it's safe to assume that current technology surpasses what was available then, and that usability of ebooks has only improved by the standards of the educators interviewed in the article. Most interesting are the ways ebooks can be used in education: I was particularly intrigued by the automatic text-to-speech capabilities of many ebook readers, including the Kindle. The educational possibilities of this simple feature are endless - from helping the blind without braille to encouraging grapheme awareness in young readers.

My prompt is "What if every student had a Kindle?" I think this would on the whole be a great benefit to education. Ebooks are much more convenient than real books in many ways. You can fit any number of books inside one lightweight ebook, and as far as communicating non-fictional information goes, they're objectively superior to real books, which are often out of date. The initial price would admittedly be a high barrier to entry for most schools, but imagine the costs of maintaining a typical high school library. Building maintenance, book upkeep, paying librarians, etc. After a few years of using a ebook-only education, a school would doubtless make up for its costs. I don't think they do a lot for learning on their own, but they're definitely a more efficient way to handle what is currently handled by maintaining huge libraries of textbooks.

Possible downsides might include high costs due to damage or theft. Ereaders are pretty sturdy, but children have the mysterious potential to destroy literally almost anything. This could be improved by developing an even more sturdy ebook chassis specially designed for elementary schoolers. As far as theft goes, it's not as big of a problem as you'd think. Like many pieces of lended-out personal electronics, the school would have the ability to remotely disable functionality of any reader. Some readers even have rudimentary tracking devices. On the whole, I think the downsides are worth considering, but that they pale in comparison to the benefits switching to an ebook education can bring.


Bull, G. & Sites, M. (2009, August). Digital Libraries: Shifting the Landscape. ISTE Learning & Leading Digital Edition. Retrieved from http://www.iste.org/learn/publications/learning-and-leading/digital-edition-august-2009.aspx