Alberta’s Ministry of Advanced Education and Technology has announced a plan to implement an online textbook depository for college and university students.
“We’ll build a little cloud [online] where we’ll have all these textbooks,” minister Doug Horner told the Edmonton Journal in an end-of-year interview.
The ministry said in a statement the proposal would fit in with current trends among university students.
Rachel Bouska, spokesperson for the ministry, said although the proposal is at its earliest stages, students and institutions would benefit from this once it is implemented.
“Students are on iPads, laptops and have e-reader devices anyway, so this would just [increase] the ease of it,” she said.
She said the minister hopes to include commonly used first-year textbooks in different institutions and textbooks written in the province by Alberta professors.
“The purpose would be to reduce the cost of textbooks and try to cut costs in half,” she added.
“There’s nothing concrete but we’ll be looking at setting up something in the next year,” she added.
However, several Carleton University students said they believed the project would not be well-received.
First-year journalism student Vanessa King said she has trouble reading words on a screen for an extended period of time.
King and other students said they would end up printing textbooks out.
“Even if they were online, I would probably end up printing most of it out, which makes the cut in price useless to me,” she said.
According to Naana Sappong, a second-year cognitive-science major, her course in statistics in behavioral science already offers an online version of the textbook, but some students still bought a hard copy of the textbook.
“I would prefer a hard copy of books,” said second-year civil engineering student Aman Goitom. Hard copy, Goitom said, is “easier to work with, especially with engineering courses.”