Despite presumptions that digital media are overtaking printed works, a recent survey shows e-books are failing to gain popularity on college campuses.

Three in four college students prefer printed materials to electronic text, according to an October survey by OnCampus Research. At Syracuse University, the e-book trend has also failed to gain attention with the library canceling an e-book rental program last year. There are no plans for SU to purchase more e-books or readers, but some predict e-books will eventually catch on because of their affordability.

Of the 13 percent of college students who purchased an e-book from July to October, more than half stated the e-books were required for their class work, according to the survey.

The SU library department launched an e-reader pilot program in fall 2009, purchasing two Amazon Kindle DX devices and issuing them to E.S. Bird and Carnegie libraries. Librarians loaded each device with textbooks that many students had tried to borrow through interlibrary loans.

‘Rather than buying one copy that one person could use at a time, we provided two-hour e-reader rentals for more access,’ said Pamela McLaughlin, the library department’s director of communications and external relations.

The rental program gained little interest in the two months it was active, McLaughlin said. Though SU originally planned to purchase more Kindles, it canceled its e-reader program amid the blind-accessibility concerns of the Burton Blatt Institute, an advocacy group for people with disabilities that has its headquarters at SU. At the time, the Kindle’s text-to-speech capabilities were available only through visual menu options, prompting the institute’s complaints.

The newest Kindles are fully blind-accessible, yet SU has no plans to purchase them for rental, McLaughlin said.

‘The people that need to be involved have been involved in other projects,’ she said.

The program disappeared after the blind-accessibility issue was solved because of the low student interest in e-readers, McLaughlin said. There was also an overall shift away from e-readers with limited capabilities and toward fewer devices with greater versatility, such as smartphones and tablet computers, she said.

The SU library’s catalog of 23,000 e-books — more than one million digital resources overall, counting works stored on library databases — is available on the Internet and viewable on devices ranging from desktops and laptops to smartphones and iPads, she said.

‘I think they will gain in popularity,’ McLaughlin said, referring to e-books. ‘More people I know and see are buying them and using them effectively.’

Mengting Zhu, a freshman economics major, opts to use her e-reader when she has no intention of walking from Sadler Hall to the library, she said. Zhu, who is from Shanghai, said e-readers are significantly more popular in China than in America.

The SU Center for Digital Literacy published a free educational e-book on its website in September. The book, ‘From the Creative Minds of 21st Century Librarians,’ is a 275-page compilation of lesson plans for elementary, middle and high school classrooms.

‘I think it is just the beginning and that this number will dramatically increase in the next couple of years,’ said Marilyn Arnone, director of the center, in an e-mail.

The center published the book electronically because ‘we wanted to be able to publish something that was useful and timely for our target audience but could be produced affordably enough to allow CDL to make it available as a free download,’ she said.

E-books make financial sense for publishers and can save time for consumers, Arnone said.

Arnone said: ‘Offering e-books as texts will probably save many publishers who may not otherwise survive in this economy.’

geclarke@syr.edu 

Published on November 3, 2010 at 12:00 pm