Swap your p-book for an e-book?

Electronic publishing is big business, but Helen Davies believes the death of the textbook is greatly exaggerated.

In the 1990s, claims were rife that William Caxton's "boke" - or in today's jargon, "p-book" - had a serious rival: the e-book. Electronic publishing was set to revolutionise the literary and higher and further education landscape. But in 2002, silver-suited students with PalmPilots seem as far fetched a vision as ever.

"The expectations at the start were probably a little high," admits Dan Perry, UK e-books manager at Taylor and Francis. But he argues that "now there is a sense of reality behind it". Maybe. A conference titled "Higher education and textbooks: the future", held last month at City University in London, brought together publishers, university librarians, textbook authors and vice-chancellors to explore the issues facing academic publishing in the wake of the digital revolution. The conclusion? The death of the textbook is much exaggerated.

On the other hand, academic publishers are busy digitising backlists, bringing out-of-print titles online at a minimum cost and marketing e-book titles through their online bookstores. Other outlets for e-textbooks, the online aggregators such as Questia, Netlibrary and Ebrary, which have attracted heavy investment, are now struggling. The development of e-books is still progressing, albeit at a less frantic pace.

In the past five years, there have been several changes in academic publishing. A crucial one has been the demise of the hardback. Where traditionally textbooks were published in parallel editions, hardback for university libraries and a cross-subsidised paperback for impoverished students, even libraries are now renouncing the hardbacks and buying the cheaper (now unsubsidised) paperback. Another change is that technological advances and the desire to create a stronger and more desirable paperback market led publishers to produce CD-Roms and then companion websites.

Peter Atkins, an Oxford professor of chemistry and author of more than 40 textbooks including the ubiquitous Physical Chemistry , now in its seventh edition, is dismissive of CD-Roms when compared with websites: "They are a bit old hat nowadays. They are more expensive, less flexible and you can't update them."

Pearson Education maintains 2,000 companion websites. They are commonplace accompaniments of the printed textbook as well as being educational tools in their own right. They offer additional case material, self-testing, enhanced visuals and animations, and can be updated daily rather than having to wait for a new edition of the printed text. In other words, an interactive form of learning with which the paper version cannot compete.

One current development is the course pack, which has evolved because lecturers and students no longer rely so heavily on one core textbook. A possible scenario is an electronic form of this so-called "splicing and dicing". Lecturers, libraries and campus booksellers would download everything required for a particular course and so create a bespoke electronic reader that could be sold or lent to students, before being updated for the next course. But this revolutionary concept is still a little way off as interested parties wrangle over how to transform splicing and dicing into something economically attractive to all involved.

Besides finding online learning "really, really scary", Katie Hellier, a second-year undergraduate studying English at Nottingham University, was unimpressed the first time she went online. "I didn't get much out of it. It took so long I just gave up. It was easier to browse the books on the shelves."

It will take time for publishers, libraries, tutors and students to become accustomed to using electronic resources quickly and with confidence; until then, the well-documented problems of crashing systems, slow connections, clumsy search engines and eye strain from too much screen reading will plague online learning. Furthermore Hellier, like many others, prefers a paper book, because it is familiar, portable and easy to annotate. "I like to scribble in the margins," she says.

Although publishers have yet to agree an economic model for e-books that makes a decent profit, they are keen to highlight their new e-products. Two of these will be launched later this year. CourseCompass, from Pearson, is an online learning management platform that will allow lecturers to customise their content and monitor student performance. "An average business studies lecturer may have up to 300 students in one term. CourseCompass will allow the hard-pressed lecturer to deliver teaching materials and monitor students' progress throughout the term and not get a nasty shock at exam time," says Rod Bristow, president of Pearson Education UK. "It will also help the lecturer to focus face-to-face teaching time on those topics with which a student may be struggling." Pearson will offer 120 of its 800 e-book titles via CourseCompass, and Bristow claims that it is more than just window dressing. "We are doing all these things not because the technology allows it, but because our customers, lecturers and students, demand it."

But Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, who is resisting the pressure to publish one of his own books online, resents the way in which the internet is seen as an alternative to face-to-face education. "The missing ingredient is creativity. It might be fine for learning car mechanics." Furedi notes that most schemes for online learning in the US have foundered. He feels strongly that online learning should only ever be a supplement to real learning, and that creating bespoke reference materials will be suitable only for first-year students. Generally speaking, he is optimistic about the future of books and believes that "print on demand is the only thing that will ever work".

Atkins agrees that with e-books "there is a risk of reducing the training of the imagination". He argues that "textbooks give an intellectually rigorous presentation of a subject, so that the student can learn and acquire the logic of the subject. The e-book is more fluid, you can jump around more."

The second e-product soon to be launched, Taylor and Francis's e-compile, is based on the print-on-demand (Pod) model favoured by Furedi. "It's a really exciting future," Perry says. "Say you are writing a dissertation on Henry VIII, you can type his name into a search engine for a range of titles. You can then buy all the relevant chapters with references and customise a book." It could also be linked up to a printer that can print and bind locally. Costs of distribution, subscription and printing are yet to be finalised.

Finding a workable business model is one of the main aims of the Joint Information Systems Committee e-books working group. "Getting the model right is really perplexing us at the moment," admits Hazel Woodward, chair of the working group and librarian at Cranfield University. "How do we decide what is fair?" she says. Publishers want to preserve their revenue stream and maximise sales, and begin to recoup their investment in online developments. (Pearson lost hugely on its £83 million e-learning project, Learning Network.) Cavendish, the UK's leading law publisher, is considering making its e-books sold to libraries "read only" (no printing out) to prevent a potential decline in print sales. At the same time, university libraries can barely afford the cost of the e-books. Jisc is considering methods such as bundling, site licensing, subscriptions, rentals and pay-per-view.

Graham Taylor, director of the Council for Academic and Professional Publishers, recognises the implication of the points raised by students such as Hellier. "People like their books because they are personal," he says. Although you can buy a portable e-reader device or download a text to your PalmPilot and type in the margins, it is unlikely that such an innovative, not to mention expensive, method is going to catch on with students immediately. "Pod is the perfect halfway house," Taylor argues. "Publishers can avoid warehouse costs but can still deliver."

The most successful online ventures have been the digitisation of professional and reference titles, for example the Oxford English Dictionary and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy . Compared with their hardback versions, the ease and accessibility of these resources is a welcome addition to any library. Publishers are also targeting the professional market. Pearson is concentrating on business and management titles and a more executive market. Taylor and Francis is investing in professional medical texts.

No one doubts that emerging technologies will change the map of higher education. But until one of the many interested publishers pins down how to make a significant income out of such cutting-edge delivery methods, the demise of the textbook and its replacement with electronic learning is highly unlikely.

Helen Davies works for The Sunday Times .