Beautiful, Nose-Tickling, Irreplaceable Dust

I have spent the last week and a half in Birmingham, UK for the induction to my PhD program at the University of Birmingham.  Much of this time was dedicated to ensuring that the new doctoral students would not suffer the academic version of 'culture shock' after our two weeks on campus are over (a large cohort is Distance Learning students), but I have also spent a significant portion of my time in the campus Main Library.  It's a glorious building full of floors and floors of books, periodicals, and journals.  (And it doesn't hurt that there is a delicious café on the ground floor...)

Of course most of the time I've spent in the library has been focused on research and writing--although I spent all of today dealing with course assignments and student questions (I'm teaching my courses via DL/online platform for the two weeks I'm gone), but I've definitely spent more than a few minutes simply drooling over all the beautiful books.  Please don't misunderstand me: I love my iPad.  This [over-priced] magical tablet allows me access to millions upon millions of books; however, I will never, ever accept a touchscreen as an equitable replacement for the texture of paper.  True: I've sneezed more in the past few hours in the library than I normally do in a week, but this seems a small price to pay to be in the presence of so many glorious tomes.  Caxtons, caxtons, everywhere! 

I am an admitted, unabashed bibliophile.  --A sneezy bibliophile, but one who will defend the importance of paper no matter how brilliant the technology is to come.

Today's moral: Read a book, a real one, one that has a possibility of giving you a paper-cut.

Books, schmooks

As inevitably happens every semester, a few weeks in, I run into the issue of students who still do not have their textbooks. Ideally, I only have to deal with the handful of students who are waiting on financial aid disbursements, waiting on their next paycheck, or are simply trying to squeak by without buying the text; in reality, the campus Bookstore is nearly as big a problem as the first three.

I have students in both my ENG 120 and ENG 262 classes that do not have textbooks because the Bookstore did not order enough books and is now awaiting secondary shipments. Paired with the constant chatter about E-texts (especially since Apple just threw its bid back in the game), this textbook issue is definitely helping to sway me toward e-texts.

Now, to be clear, I realize that any number of college students simply won't treat an e-book the same as a hard book; think: out of sight, out of mind. I still love, and always will, allergen-creating paper books, but I also read probably half my books on my Ipad now. The beauty of an e-text, as opposed to ordering a book online, is that we only have to wait for an e-text to download (at most this takes maybe 30 minutes, with slow internet and a big file), as opposed to waiting on the packaging process, post office, etc.

But will e-books and e-texts actually replace our paper texts? I think they will definitely start to supplement hard-copy texts, but replace them entirely?

What do you think?