The Net Generation and E-Textbooks

E-Books

Electronic monographs have been exchanged between scholars since the early years of the Internet, before Windows software and the mouse became the norm. They evolved through UNIX, gopher, FTP (file transfer), and, finally, hypertext transfer (HTTP) protocols (Snowhill, 2001). Despite some negative reviews, e-books have several important advantages over their print counterparts. Most important is the off-campus, 24 X 7 availability of e-books. This is the single most distinct advantage e-books have over print titles. E-books can also be helpful for those with disabilities: “digital text can be enlarged, read via specialized devices, or easily converted into audio format” (Dillon, 2001, p. 123). Another advantage over print is the searching capabilities provided by e-books. The ability to keyword search through the full-text of a manuscript is a big advantage over a table of contents or even the best index.