E-Book Sales Surpass Hardcover at Amazon
Last week for the first time, electronic editions of books outsold hardcovers through Amazon.com by 143 to 100. This included hardcover books for which there is no e-edition. Amazon has sold hardcovers for 15 years and e-books for only one fifth that time. In August, Stanford University announced all incoming medical students will be provided with an iPad.
So when will veterinary medical education embrace the revolution?
There are a few readers who gasp at such changes and immediately assert that an e-version can’t possibly hold the same cultural value as the big, heavy dead tree volumes. They claim the printed word is in jeopardy. Do you recall the objections offered about calculators in class or rural electrification as a menace, or photography will kill portrait painting? Same argument, different century.
Before you send a mob to tar and feather me, let me say that I love books and have a large library. I especially like old, nonfiction. I like the feel, the smells, and meticulous pen and ink drawings of things nautical, mechanical, medical, and inventive. I still have a lot of my old textbooks.That said, I am also not the market.
Rendering most textbooks to e-books is a reasonable and a practical thing to do yet is one of the slowest sectors changing. Consider that we teach medical imaging on machines operating at the speed of light at the sub-atomic level that generate images that can be rendered to 3-D, colorized and manipulated spatially to provide unmatched information.Yet, (with all due respect to Dr. Thrall’s expertise) the leading veterinary radiology book is still a two dimensional representation that uses actual images and illustrations. Granted, some texts feature CDs or PDFs as part of their package but still it lacks the usefulness that an e-book can provide. And students are increasingly reluctant to use CDs.
So why isn’t veterinary medical education offering to become a template study for professional e-book development? Why aren’t they suggesting all freshmen DVM students get a free reader instead of buying 40 pounds of paper that can’t be updated and a Hill’s book bag to carry it all around in? And did I mention cost?
