Comparing Digital And Textbooks And Their Effects On...

Comparison of Digital and Print textbooks and their effects on helping university students study efficiently Joyce J. Lam University of California, Irvine Author Note Joyce Josephine Lam University of California, Irvine jjlam@uci.edu SS3A HW ID: 104 Abstract This paper explores the pros and cons of using digital formats verses print formats of textbooks, particularly e-textbooks and traditional textbooks, and seeks to ask how effective these textbook formats are for university students and their studies. The purpose of this paper is to examine these different textbook formats is to see which has the potential and ability to help students in the best capacity possible. There are clear reasons on how digital textbooks and†¦show more content†¦Because we live in a modern age of much technological advancements, many students in universities are looking to see if it is still worth buying physical textbooks or to utilize digital formats like e-textbooks as a means of efficiency or even as a way to cut costs of paying for expensive textbooks. To understand which format is more effective, we need to study the different formats and see what are the strengths and weaknesses found in the two different formats. This paper will examine resea rch done by multiple researchers and use their research to help find the format that best helps students to study and retain material learned from their textbook Defining E-textbooks and Traditional Textbooks E-textbooks are often defined as texts that are able to be accessed on electronic devices. Most research has defined them as texts that are digital and accessed via electronic screens (Rockinson-Szapkiw, Courdoff, Carter, Bennett, 2012), in which there two formats that exist. The first format is the page fidelity e-textbook and second is the reflowable digital e-textbook. The page fidelity e-textbook is a simple scanned picture of the print version of a book, which can usually come in the form of a PDF (Rockinson-Szapkiw, Courdoff, Carter, Bennett, 2012). The page fidelity e-textbook has no