University gets a little more expensive every year. Around here at Waterloo we all have great, usually well-paying, co-op jobs; but an ever-towering tuition means that most people are still on a tight budget, especially with educational material. And the most expensive education material? After your tuition, it’s the textbooks. The couple thousand pieces of paper with nice (if somewhat abstract) covers which, according to the Canadian Federation of Students, costs an average of $500 to $1000 dollars per year. And while you may have shelled out a lot of cash to buy them, your textbooks will never sell for nearly as much. When the next version comes out, you eat the depreciation like a bowl of sawdust. Sure, someone else might still be willing to pay for it, but only because they know they can get a great deal on a book which is likely to be out of date and of only limited use.
Fortunately, there is a better way. Our salvation comes in the form of the humble ebook, and the .pdf file that most of us are familiar with as the way we disperse all of our resumes come Jobmine season. Many of the biggest publishers now offer ebook versions of their textbooks at reduced prices. Nelson sells its textbooks for about 40% of the price of the hardcover, and others like Pearson give similar incentives to ditch the print version for good. But price is not the only advantage that electronic textbooks offer; ebooks have a whole host of great characteristics which can make your life a little bit easier.
One of the great things about an ebook is that its easy to get if, and only if, you need it. One common strategy to keep the price of textbooks down is to wait and see if it’s going to be necessary for the class. It’s a great strategy, until you realize Saturday afternoon that you did need the textbook after all, and you’ll be flunking that quiz Monday morning without it. What are you going to do? Jump on Kijiji looking for a cheap, older version of the textbook you can procure in the next few hours and within busing distance? Never fear! With an ebook, you can buy the textbook instantly, and it will be ready for you to start desperately skimming in minutes.
To be fair, if your strategy is to buy the textbook when you need it, chances are you don’t really need the textbook. Rather, you need a bit of help with this one part and the other resources you have just aren’t enough. Well then I have an even better solution: buy individual chapters from the textbook, and only pay for the parts you are going to use. This is another great option which you can only really get with a ebook, not a textbook, and a very economical one. Nelson, for instance, offers single chapters for anywhere from two to eight dollars each.
As I’ve already said, price is a huge incentive to make the jump to electronic literature, and convenience is another. Does this mean that those of us who will be buying our textbooks at the start of the year are best off shopping around for a used version, likely at a comparable price point? Maybe not. Electronic textbooks have some other distinct advantages over their more technologically-disabled counterparts. For a start, they’re much lighter. Basically weightless in fact. Long have there been jokes about academics who are unable to do a single pushup, but then squat 90.9 kilograms thanks to their well-toned leg and back muscles. But the weight of your backpack should be a real concern; in the US, over 28 000 people went to hospital after being injured by their too-heavy backpacks in 2012. With an ebook, on the other hand, you probably don’t even need to lug any extra weight around at all. Your laptop, your tablet, or your phone can take the place of all of your textbooks, and you don’t need to buy any fancy new hardware to get the full experience.
Ebooks offer some other major advantages over traditional textbooks. You can, for instance, add all of the digital bookmarks you want, and never have to worry about them falling out. Even more useful, you can quickly search the entire textbook for a specific keyword, or an entire phrase if you remember a concept but not where in the book it was. It’s a much more efficient and effortless than filing through a fickle and limited index, which may or may not have been made with keywords you would think to look up. And you can study any time and any place you want; your reference material is always just a few button presses away.
Electronic textbooks are a great alternative to the traditional physical book. They offer the always useful, sometime mandatory advantage of being a current, up-to-date version of the textbook without the new-textbook price. They are much more convenient, accessible on all of your electronic devices and take away from the potentially dangerous mass you place on your back every day. They can even be sold chapter by chapter if that suits your studying needs. Textbooks are a huge investment that can make or break the bank; ebooks give you a superior product, and at a much lower price. So next year, skip the book store line; buy your textbooks for a fraction of the price without getting out of bed.
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