Distance Education

At first glance, it seems that electronic books would be a wonderful and convenient resource for distance ed students – if the book you want is available electronically. Here are some advantages and disadvantages of electronic books and a strategy to help you use them most effectively.

Advantages:

• No shipping – e-books, being electronic, are available immediately online.
• Searchable – even if the e-book reader software does not include a search function, you can still use your browser or .pdf reader software to search the text.
• Accessibility for disabilities – electronic book text can be run through screen-readers or changed to make it more readable.
• Portable – You can get your ebook pretty much anywhere, you don’t need a library to house it.

Disadvantages

• Only available online – Some of our ebooks can not be downloaded, so you have to be online to read them.
• It’s hard to read text on a screen – This may be more personal preference than anything else, but I find it harder to read big blocks of text on a computer monitor than I do on paper.
• Not very portable – You need a computer or some other device to read it and can’t just pull that book out of your bag when you have 15 minutes.

So, how can you, as a distance ed student, take best advantage of these things?

First, don’t look specifically for ebooks. Think less about the format of the book and more about the content that will be most helpful. Search the library catalog for books on your topic and take the best ones, whether they are ebooks or not.

Here are some other ideas

• Get familiar with how the ebook system you’re using works. Many ebooks, but not all, come as .pdf files you read using the Adobe Acrobat reader you are likely already familiar with.
• Learn to search the ebook. Tables of contents and indexes are useful, but one major advantage of ebooks is that you can use the computer to sift through them for just what you want rather than you skimming the pages directly. Take advantage of that.
• Use InfoHawk to find ebooks. We buy many collections of ebooks like Books 24/7, Cognet or netLibrary. All the individual ebook titles are listed in our library catalog, though. Use the Advanced Search and change the Format menu to “E-Books” to find only ebooks on your topic.

Let us know what you think. Do you prefer print or electronic books? What other advantages or disadvantages do you see?

Dan the Librarian