Newsflash: College kids don’t like e-textbooks

The “everything’s going digital” crowd must be very confused. After all, for years they’ve been telling us that all content is moving to digital. Yes, they’ll admit there are a few Luddites who still cling to print — because of some deranged emotional attachment, perhaps — but sooner or later their numbers will dwindle and everyone will be reading everything on shiny little devices.

Why then are so many young people reading printed books? See Why digital natives prefer reading in print.

Textbook makers, bookstore owners and college student surveys all say millennials still strongly prefer print for pleasure and learning …

I suspect there’s a lot of hand-wringing and … shock, actually … that this could be the case. Aren’t these “digital native” folks the very ones who were supposed to usher in the Age of Digitarius? Why are they turning aside from the mystic digital vision?

Perhaps we need to reconsider the “everything’s going digital” mantra.

The digital advocates figured that since kids are on devices 24×7 they would naturally want to read on those devices. The reason the predictions of lots of new digital readers haven’t panned out as planned is that the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premise. There are lots of reasons for this, but one of the main reasons is quite simple. For some purposes print is simply better.

There are other factors, too, like the very low price of used (print) books, and the fact that a used book can be helpful — especially when key sections are already highlighted. (If you’re in potions, you really want the half-blood prince’s book, right?)

I read on my iPad just about every day, but I would never want to study for a test on one because I know that memory is tied to other senses. I can picture myself, sitting for the exam, thinking, “The answer to this question was in the front of the book, on the bottom right of an odd-numbered page, and I highlighted it in yellow. There was a picture of barchans right above it.” (I studied geology in school.)

Those things help.

Think of the time you tried to remember someone’s name and you got to it by remembering around it. You started to think of things close by in your memory, like where you met the person, or when you last saw him, and somehow your brain circled in and got back to the name — because memory is tied to associations.

The physical position of words on a page can help you remember the content on that page. The feel of the paper even helps, and the heft of the pages to the left and right.

Also, a book doesn’t beep at you when some app wants to update, or when you get a text, or … a hundred other things. Digital devices can be annoyingly distracting. If you want to hunker down and study, print is better.

Maybe some day we will have digital versions of textbooks that will actually be better than print, but we’re still a very long way from there. And even at that, Jean-Luc Picard will still read printed books. (In the Greek, if I remember correctly.)

Publishing has been plagued by a group of people who promote a simplistic digital good, print bad mindset. We need to get beyond that and start thinking about serving a need with the appropriate tool. Whatever that tool might be.

This article makes some similar points, and is worth your time: 8 Lessons From the Failure of Digital Magazines to Revolutionize Publishing.