In an article featured by the Dallas Morning News (“Our fleeting focus,” Sunday, August 7, 2011), Nicholas Carr says that, given what we know now, schools should be wary of replacing textbooks with e-readers. I agree.

In fact, I think everyone should be wary of replacing bound volumes with e-readers or replacing e-readers with bound volumes.

As my older grandchildren now purchase textbooks assigned by their schools or colleges, they (more accurately, their parents) must spend $50-100 for each used copy of books that are required for the 2011-2012 academic year. The total cost of new ones is at least $2,000-2,500.

This is a pricing obscenity, causing me to suspect that bankers are involved.

Newer is not necessarily better. Bound volumes and e-readers are not competing in a zero-sum game, as their zealous advocates incorrectly suggest. Our world needs both because both offer unique benefits.

A former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok, once observed, “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” True but that statement by no means justifies the usurious prices of textbooks.

I suggest that you read these brief excerpts from Carr’s article. Also, preferably, his book. Perhaps you will then agree with Carr and others such as I “we should always think twice before rushing to replace old tools with new ones.

“E-readers sacrifice many of these navigational cues, and that’s another reason why so many students end up frustrated with the devices.

When students “have no cognitive maps on which to rely,” the researchers [at the Universities of Washington and California/Berkeley] wrote, “the process of locating information takes longer, they have less mental energy for other tasks, and their ability to maintain their desired levels of productivity suffers.” It’s certainly possible to provide on-screen tools, such as scroll bars, that can aid in the creation of cognitive maps for e-books, but it’s unlikely that a digital book will ever provide the rich and intuitive set of tactile cues that a printed book offers.

“None of this is to say that e-readers won’t come to play an important role in education. Students already do a great deal of reading and research on computer screens, after all, and there are many things that digital documents can do that printed pages can’t. What the research does tell us is that it’s rash to assume that e-textbooks are a perfect substitute for printed textbooks. The printed page continues to be a remarkably powerful reading tool, and it seems to be particularly well suited to the needs of students.

“At a conference last year in Austin, Gov. Rick Perry [a noted authority on academic excellence in higher education] argued that printed textbooks should be abolished in favor of e-books. ‘I don’t see any reason in the world why we need to have textbooks in Texas in the next four years,’ he said. Many school administrators and government officials make similar assumptions, with little or no evidence to back them up. If they went out and looked at how students actually read, study, and learn, they’d see that paper books and electronic books are different tools and that the printed page continues to have many advantages over the screen.

“New technologies are seductive, but we should always think twice before rushing to replace old tools with new ones.”

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To read the complete article, please click here.

Nicholas Carr is the author, most recently, of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. His email address is ncarr@mac.com.