I just dropped the book-bill bomb on my parents. Needless to say, warnings of “you better actually read these” followed. Of course I will, Mom and Dad … maybe.
The whirlwind of textbook purchasing at the beginning of every semester has transformed into an art form. Throughout this painful process, most students go to multiple stores, snagging a few from Chegg, maybe just passing on books altogether because a professor dropped the blessed, “All PowerPoints will be posted online.” Well, I have a prediction that may sound far-fetched at first, but here it goes: By the time our children are in college, textbooks will be obsolete. We won’t use them.
Yes, I understand this may sound stupid at first. How can one have school without textbooks, right? To many, the two go hand in hand. However, many will tell you that most of their classes don’t use them and that more material is Web- or CD-focused.
I speak from personal experience. Last semester, due to various reasons, I did not have to buy a single textbook. Due to free online texts, a professor slipping, “All test questions are from the PowerPoints” and the advice of TAs, I slunk through without a single one. This made me think: How quickly are we moving away from buying books and toward purchasing access codes?
The power and efficiency of the Internet is obvious. Communication and information can be transmitted in a nanosecond, and the whole world is literally at your fingertips. Almost everybody is computer literate, and every generation has greater ease in using new technology. Most of the world’s information is housed online, and it’s constantly updated with new developments, discoveries and opinions. It goes uncontested as the most efficient, user-friendly and influential source of information in existence. So why, with such prevailing dominance, do universities still use textbooks that are, especially with the speed at which technology moves, so outdated?
If we are to learn at the caliber necessary to compete in today’s workforce, we’ll need to stay current on academia, and textbooks aren’t an efficient way to do so. By the time a book is written, edited, published and finally sold, it is most likely out of date. As much as the old schoolers like to keep things traditional, it is becoming more obvious how superior Internet-based learning is to books. Classes are slowly transforming to become more e-based and embrace the proficiency, not to mention the millions of pieces of paper it saves our ever-consuming world.
I’ll close with a plug for my dear old Dad, a math professor back in Georgia. Always Mr. Traditional, he was probably one of the few happy to see me purchasing books this semester. In his eyes and the eyes of people like him, reading textbooks and studying is the “proper” way to learn. Well, Dad, I hope this article isn’t too frustrating, but it’s this mindset that could keep academia from progressing. Yes, textbooks are filled with tons of correct and useful knowledge, but in an increasingly technological and constantly changing world, there is no way they can compete with the benefits of online-based information.
Are textbooks on the way out? Nobody can be sure, but I would like to think that they are. Maybe my children will have online textbooks, and maybe they won’t, but for the sake of my checkbook and their future, I sure hope they do.
Laura Ellermeyer is a first-year finance major.
