One electronic textbook weighing half a kilo! This is what students will carry in their backpacks in the future, instead of the traditional five to eight kilos of heavy books. Moreover, the device can store all the manuals from the first to eleventh grades, as well as an entire library in electronic format. At present, four hundred of these innovative textbooks, developed by the company Pocketbook International, have already been tested in Kyiv schools.
The Pocketbook Educations electronic textbook has a strong resemblance to regular books. Its 9.7 display is similar to the size of an average sheet. The initial page contains a schedule, calendar, dictionary, and a recent links section next to the main menu, which includes the following sections: textbooks, notes, library, applications, photographs, etc. A few more buttons on the manual control panel complete the electronic textbook design. It is quite straightforward to use: finding information is easy, flipping “pages” and returning to previous files is simple. Each electronic page of the textbook is identical to its paper counterpart. The electronic textbook, for example, is quite convenient for studying languages. Apart from the obligatory content, one can download additional dictionaries and audio files, and listen to them as well. However, access to the internet or displaying color pages are yet to appear.
“Pocketbook Educations is the world’s first e-book designed as a textbook,” commented Oleh Naumenko, the vice president of Pocketbook. “We received a certificate of compliance with pedagogical requirements from the Ministry of Education and Science, as well as an approval for the usage from the Ministry of Health. Owing to the electronic book, we will achieve a breakthrough in education, as we provide access to information via wireless communication. The advantages of e-books are obvious. The textbook’s minimal weight will solve the problem of scoliosis. The modern display system, the so-called electronic paper, does not harm vision because the light is reflected from the display as from regular paper. We produced five new models specially adapted for school textbooks. We are confident that the electronic textbook can make studying more interesting. High school and college students will use the textbook. And we will raise the number of books the average citizen reads to ten a year — today this figure is less than a third of a book.”
The greatest asset of the electronic textbook is that it can store up to ten thousand books. The company possesses a clearly developed scheme for filling the textbook with information. For this purpose the school textbooks database was formed of on a corresponding portal; they were adapted to electronic format to fit the screen. The price of the electronic version of any textbook for the school curriculum is 10-15 hryvnias, which is two to three times cheaper than regular books. Developers argue that the e-book’s price, which costs 2,500 hryvnias, will be compensated in a few years. By the end of this year, 10-15 thousand Pocketbook Educations will be produced. One will hardly be able to get book versions illegally, since each copy is tagged with a unique IMEI number, which cannot be copied.
“Being a textbook author, I know how difficult and even risky it is to publish books; owing to the electronic system these issues can be resolved,” says the teacher Oleksandr Ister, the author of the textbook Algebra for the 7th Grade. “I think in 10-15 years we will switch entirely to electronic books which will not only save wood, but also electricity, since they can work for two to four weeks without recharging.”
It is still unknown how soon this e-book will reach Ukrainian students. Despite the fact that the producers of the book got an approval from the Ministry of Education and Science, so far there is no state program on the introduction of this book in the school curriculum. However, in the present situation, the emergence of such a book in schools would help solve the problem of the lack of textbooks, as in the case of 10th graders this year, whose books were not printed on time.
