As students buy tablets and other complex mobile devices, it would be a safe bet to say most of us would undoubtedly prefer to replace our bulky textbooks with one device that lets us access as many learning materials as we need to without needing to think about how much we can put in our backpacks at once. Until now, we’ve been resigned to purchasing giant, expensive textbooks from the University of Waterloo Book Store, happening to find them from the dismal selection at Feds Used Books, or finding an upper year willing to sell them. As people feel more comfortable just sending around files to access course content now, there is a growing number of people who just find a PDF of the textbook and download it instead. To combat this and to offer a more competitive choice, the Book Store is now offering e-books from Google.
When a new technology is released to the masses, people try to find ways to use this technology to reduce the dependence on the number of things they need to keep track of in their life and make tasks simpler. With the computer, people replaced documents and files that normally would have been stored in binders with virtual documents. With the smartphone, people replace task managers and address books with virtual ones stored with the phone.
With the tablet, now becoming more successful because of the iPad and potentially the Kindle Fire, there is a large market emerging for replacing traditional media with particular respect to magazines and books with virtual e-books and applications that replicate or extend the functionality of traditional print media. When there is no easily accessible digital option available, many people will take to the illegal digital file they’ve found from their friends or from some website. Not only is it cheaper, it’s also a lot more convenient than heading to the Book Store and exchanging your life savings for a bulldozer to bring your sumo-wrestler sized pile of books home.
The Book Store’s decision to offer Google eBooks is a good step towards embracing the digital age in the education market. From the selection on the Book Store’s website so far, it looks like there’s a fair share of books that are available for purchase in a variety of subjects. E-books purchased through the Book Store’s website are readable on iOS, Android, computers, the Nook, the Sony Reader and the Kobo Reader. The Kindle is not yet supported because of limitations in Google’s format. E-books are stored on Google’s servers, so there is less concern of losing them in a catastrophic event such as a hard drive failure, but Google also theoretically has the ability to remove e-books instantly as it sees fit.
While having Google eBooks are welcome, this should be only a stepping stone for the Book Store’s push on electronic textbooks. The Kindle Store has a library of e-books that rivals, if not surpasses, Google’s selection. If the Book Store is able to cut a deal of sorts with Amazon to get the Kindle Store as another option through the Book Store’s website, that would be a benefit both to consumer choice and to the selection available to students. It would then be convenient if the Book Store could instead offer a chart, much like the in-store availability tables of large franchise store websites, that would let you know if the book you wanted was available in the Book Store, through Google eBooks or through the Kindle Store. I would suggest the same for Apple’s iBookstore should the selection improve, but unless there is a change to Apple’s store policies, the chance of the Book Store making some sort of profit from Apple’s iBookstore sales is slim.
Even if the Book Store doesn’t manage to share profit with Google’s competitors, it would still be beneficial for students if the other e-book stores offer a better selection of textbooks. A better selection across all e-book stores would drive competition between stores to offer the textbooks each student needs. Since each store caters to a subset of all the devices available for reading, it would help students since they could get it off the store that supports the devices they use to read their textbooks.
For our benefit, we can only hope that in the next few years enough textbooks are offered on online stores that we can replace that expensive heavy box of books with an expensive light tablet-like reading device. Even those who don’t want to lose the ability to have something tangible would still have the option to buy the physical copy, but at least there would be a choice. Having all our textbooks legally at our disposal with a quick swipe or tap, all stored in a portable yet reading-sized device, would make it easier to bring textbooks with you when you need them most and would have a small yet significant positive impact on your ability to learn. When you’re going between classes and are trying to carry as much as you can to survive classes, having that extra backpack space makes all the difference in the world. It’s good to see the Book Store doing its part to bring this to reality. If their selection improves in the next couple years, expect to see a lot less people in that long and tedious line-up in September.
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