We had a nano-bunfight about this on the thread about Arnie switching to e-books for Californ-i-ay's schools (billed as 'Arnie Bans Books'
). Personally I say bring on the e-books - it's the content, not the medium that's important AFAIC...
There's something about reading something in a book or magazine, though, that I find inherently more recall-able.
My memory isn't as good nowadays, but as a teenager, at school, I had an almost photographic memory, I could almost visualise the page of a book, and if I needed to double check something, I would be able to go to virtually the right section, even page of a book, I could visualise whether it was on the left hand or right hand page, at the top or bottom, on the left or right side of the page... I can still do that sometimes now, if I've read something in a newspaper or magazine, I still visualise which page it was on, and whereabouts on the page.
I don't think I would have been able to absorb so much information if I saw it on a computer screen. Maybe in hindsight there was also something of a tactile/physical element to my memory? Because I know that if I vaguely recall a fact or some information that I've read on a computer screen, my visual memory is a vague 'I read it on the internet' kind of thing, and I don't 'see' really any further than the screen, or maybe I recall the website... although I'm quite proficient at searching and so can search for the information again, but I don't have the visual recall that I do/did with physical books, I guess partly because you scroll up and down, the text or images move around, so they're not 'set' in my memory.
I think perhaps that if schools go down the e-books road, then there's going to be a gear-change in terms of knowledge and learning. Just like the advent of calculators in schools moved pupils away from learning how to use slide rules and log tables and being able to show their workings kind of thing, and emphasis moved more from being able to do maths, to being able to use the tools that do maths. And perhaps there will be a shift from requiring students to actually learn things, to them learning how to use the tools that find the answers. Which is what a lot of students do nowadays, just Googling their homework and cut & pasting someone else's knowledge, without necessarily learning it themselves. Whether that's a good thing, whether that amounts to progress... I don't know.
Btw, is it possible to write in e-books? To make notes? Like what if you're doing Romeo and Juliet in English literature, and you want/need to underline sections, write notes in the margin? (I wouldn't normally recommend or approve of defacing school books, but in some cases, it's really useful.)
