Jan

Data Conversion Laboratory and the Future of Digital Textbooks

DCL was on hand at Digital Book World and CEO Mark Gross spoke with GoodEReader about a topic that was a pervasive theme at this year’s event, especially in light of Apple’s new initiatives last week, namely the digital publication of textbooks. While the concept of digital textbooks at the higher education level became a widespread topic of discussion in the past couple of years, new movements in digital publishing have made digital textbooks a more viable option in even public education. Several countries worldwide are working on future planning to go entirely digital in education in even the elementary school grades.

Gross explained some of the fallacies behind running beliefs in the public’s mind concerning digital textbooks, primarily that the textbooks will be profoundly cheaper and that the public education sector will not be able to keep up financially with the rising costs of providing e-reader devices to all of the K through 12th grade students.

Data Conversion Laboratory initially spoke to GoodEReader in an interview in December about the status of poorly formatted ebooks and how those titles are affecting the market as a whole, so it should come as no surprise that DCL can project on how poorly formatted or converted digital textbooks can negatively impact education, possibly going so far as to cause a consumer backlash against electronic reading if the formatting of required reading material is subpar.

Mercy Pilkington (1126 Posts)

Mercy Pilkington is a young-adult author and a teacher in a correctional facility. She does not have a single textbook in her classroom. With the top-of-the-line technology at her disposal and the low reading ability of many of her students, there’s no need for standard paper texts. Instead she relies on e-readers, iPads, desktop PCs, Polycom video conferencing equipment for virtual field trips, live streaming for science demonstrations, and text-to-speech read-aloud software to teach English and science. Within the next ten years, public school classrooms across the country are going to look a lot more like Mercy’s classroom because the educational possibilities with these kinds of technologies are limitless. Have a question? Send an email to mercypilkington@yahoo.com