This is the future of education. Today, it’s college textbooks. Tomorrow, kids will have no idea why you’d ever try to put information on paper. From pre-school to graduate school, it will be electronic media all the way.Why not? There are huge advantages to going electronic over the traditional ink on paper approach. First, the cost. Those texts tend to be thick. That’s part of what makes them heavy. There’s also the notion that you have to use extra sturdy covers and special slick paper that isn’t seen so much in trade hardcovers and paperbacks. Perhaps it’s because they think you’ll keep your precious texts for a lifetime. Are you kidding? Have you seen how students treat those things? Besides, in fields like engineering and computer science, the information starts going obsolete before you even graduate.
Get rid of the paper and you can drop the cost dramatically. Electronic textbooks move through the ether and the Ethernet. There are no transportation or bookstore handling costs to speak of. Students love the savings. Trees breathe a sigh of relief. Hey, we need those trees to breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen to make up for the rest of us who are doing just the opposite.
Think of the children, their backs broken from decades of education as beasts of burden. It’s painful to watch them trudging home laden down with a backpack full of textual tonnage. All of that goes away instantly with a simple shift from textbooks to eTextbooks.
This school year, you don’t need more textbooks. What you need for your college courses is the Kno iPad application. Kno? Yes, Kno. It’s free. I downloaded it myself in less than a minute. Even before you launch into shopping for electronic textbooks, the Kno app comes preloaded with sample documents and how-to lessons. There are lessons on features, how to add a PDF, using gestures, social networking and about Kno. You even get sample books and a PDF to play around with. If you like what you see, you can shop for your electronic text books and be ready for class.
Some of the highlights of Kno and the Kno reader app include a course manager so you can organize your textbooks and PDFs by class and term. There is one-touch highlighting with multiple colors, a tap to zoom images, portrait and landscape reading modes, pinch to zoom in on pages in the portrait mode, ability to annotate with sticky notes and bookmarks, the same page and chapter numbering as in the physical textbook itself, and social connectivity so you can ask questions, post comments or share your location with friends.
Are you on the way to college or about to start a new term? Before you make a beeline to the campus bookstore, take a closer look at the Kno eTextbook reader application and the 30 to 50% discounts on the textbooks you need for class. There’s even a 15 day money back guarantee on any textbook so you won’t have to worry about dropping a class and getting stuck with the books. All you need is your trusty iPad and you are ready to go.
