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One of the first universities that conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups on e-Textbooks in and out of the classroom was Indiana University. In 2010, Indiana University conducted a series of studies investigating e-Textbook usage with undergraduates, graduates, and instructors in different departments. They found that students thought the e-Textbook was easy to use, and claimed they read more of the book when using the e-Textbook. Also, the students said having access to the instructors’ highlights and notes was much more valuable to them than having access to others students' notes. However, instructors did not expect the students to read the textbook and therefore did not use it to its full teaching potential.
Indiana University's (2012)’s findings suggest that students do not annotate and highlight because instructors do not model this behavior. They claimed that an engaged instructor is critical to the success of the digital material. Usability of the e-Textbook is a high priority, as students who struggle with how to use the e-Textbook device will not use it, and it needs to have all the core features (highlighting, zooming, paging, etc.).
McKelvain (2011) investigated the use of features such as highlighting and annotating on an e-Textbook for writing and studying tasks. Their results showed that students highlighted frequently, but would often use outside materials (e.g. notecards, notepads, word processing document, etc.) instead of the annotation feature of the e-Textbook. This has been shown to be true for a variety of devices for textbook access, including the iPod Touch and cell phone (Chao & Chen, 2009; Johnson, Levine, Smith, & Stone, 2010).
Differences have been found in how people read digital text versus printed material. Liu (2005) found that when reading digital text, users report they are more likely to browse the material and scan for keywords but highlight and annotate less. Berg et al., (2010) reported that undergraduates adopt a less linear strategy when reading an e-Book than a printed book. The reading strategy also differs when reading for leisure (i.e., novels) than when reading a textbook. During leisure reading, readers typically read from beginning to end and do not focus on marking or annotating specific material. During textbook usage, readers are more likely to skim, scan, and navigate non-sequentially through the textbook to find information (Berry, Cook, Hill, & Stevens, 2011; Horney & Anderson-Inman, 1994; Wandersee, 1988). However, Weisberg (2011) compared several different e-Reading devices to paper books and found that while students preferred the paper books more, over time they became more and more receptive to the e-Reading devices.
Readers may use navigation features in a regular book differently than an e-Book, like Table of Contents, Index, and search capability. Abdullah and Gibbs (2008) found that readers consistently, and successfully, used an index when reading a paper book but did not realize an index was even available when using the e-Book.
Students may conduct tasks (e.g. bookmaking and highlighting) differently in an e-Book as opposed to a paper book. In a study examining reading strategies on an e-Textbook on a Nook e-Reader, Schugar, Schugar, and Penny (2011) found that students were less likely to highlight and take notes on the Nook than they were on the traditional textbook. Bookmarking pages, however, was reported to be done about as much as folding the corner of pages down in a traditional book. It is thought that the lack of annotation and highlighting activity could be attributed to a “steep learning curve” of how to use the features on the Nook.
As more schools and students switch to using e-Textbooks instead of traditional textbooks, it is important to understand how the user interface design and implementation of advanced features facilitates the strategies students employ when studying. In the next section, we look at the previous literature on e-Textbooks and the existing technology models to better understand the history of e-Textbooks usage by students and instructors. Then, we discuss our newly proposed model for e-Textbook usage, and explain how our newly proposed model provides new insights on e-Textbook adoption. We conclude with limitations and future research ideas.