All iPads All Students Please Read. [iPad for eTextbooks?]

Southernboyj said:

This is a question directly mainly at college students.

In 3 weeks, I will be returning to my University (I'm in the US) for fall semester.

Do any of you use your iPad for eTextbooks? I've never bothered with even looking into this, but now I'm really interested.

How easy is it to find an eTextbook that you need? And does it save your much money? I already have an iPad 3.

Google just announced an eTextbook service and I'd consider getting a Nexus 7 also if they have more availability.

Any insight is appreciated!

Click to expand...

At my Community College, textbooks were easily found on CourseSmart, Chegg, Kindle and Kno. Pretty much every class book could be found from one of those sources. Unfortunately, at the 4 Year University level, etextbooks are much harder to come by. When I say much harder to come by, I mean I have not found one textbook from any of my classes this entire past year that is available as an etextbook.

When at my community college, etextbooks were roughly 1/4 the price because you could rent them for specific terms rather than having to purchase the book. I pretty much was able to buy my iPad with the savings from 1 year of etextbook rentals.

My last textbook was like less than $20 as a Kindle ebook, and over $50 as a paperback. This year, mine is over $70 both in ebook and paperback format. I'm waiting until the first class to even bothering to order it. It's not a rental either.

So it's hit and miss.

All of my textbooks are free PDF downloads from faa.gov

I use my iPad exclusively for textbooks and taking notes at college. I use Notes Plus and download PDFs of my textbooks. It's great not to have to carry 20lbs of books around.

Question is are ebooks cheaper?

All my texts were on iPad. Mind you I was a film major so half my 'texts' were movies. But I was also a philosophy minor and had no trouble finding the books I needed. And many were public domain so much cheaper than buying paper

Apple screens have a whiter white than any other tablets from what I've seen, so I personally would stick with an apple device for textbooks just so the white is as white as can be.

I love my mini and I did 8 years of school after high school to earn four degrees and I wish I'd of had my ipad mini. I would still take the mini over the full size ipad. I bought an ipad retina last week and have been using it a little bit - it's mostly for the wife cause she is having our child use her kindle fire 7" - and I still prefer the mini, and don't really notice that much of a difference in how the text looks when reading a PDF between the mini and full size retina. There is a difference but its such a minor deal to me I'll take the minis over the full size any day for any use!

Buy a used copy, tear it up, feed it through a scanner, and you have your textbook as a PDF.

It only takes a few minutes (depending on your scanner). The scanner is worth it, because you can use it to go paperless as well (syllabi, handouts, bills, receipts, etc. all available in the palm of your hand). I wouldn't buy an e-textbook even if it was available, because you actually have more control over it as a PDF (not locked into someone's DRM and app). As an added bonus, if you throw all of this into Evernote (handouts, class notes, etc.) it is all searchable and easily organized

Southernboyj said:

As much hate as I am going to get for this, I'd rather torrent a book before I scanned every page.

Click to expand...

Why? If you scan it, you pay for the book, so it is legal and ethical. Instead, you would rather do something illegal and unethical. I don't see why.

The scanning takes maybe ten minutes at most (maybe five or ten more minutes for OCR -- optical character recognition). You could have all of the books for a course done in less than an hour. Heck, it might even be faster than a torrent.

Personally, while I would love to use my iPad for textbooks, none are available in ebook format and I can't be bothered buying and scanning all 12.

However, my electronics teacher said he would do it next term for us and upload it as a pdf, so I should have one

cambookpro said:

However, my electronics teacher said he would do it next term for us and upload it as a pdf, so I should have one

Click to expand...

Great lesson to teach your students with that uploading.

charlituna said:

Great lesson to teach your students with that uploading.

Click to expand...

He did write the book a few years ago...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

cambookpro said:

He did write the book a few years ago...


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

Click to expand...

And unless he is self publishing it he sold the rights to reproduce and distribute to someone else.

charlituna said:

And unless he is self publishing it he sold the rights to reproduce and distribute to someone else.

Click to expand...

He printed it in school, it's all legal.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk 2

Southernboyj said:

This is a question directly mainly at college students.

In 3 weeks, I will be returning to my University (I'm in the US) for fall semester.

Do any of you use your iPad for eTextbooks? I've never bothered with even looking into this, but now I'm really interested.

How easy is it to find an eTextbook that you need? And does it save your much money? I already have an iPad 3.

Google just announced an eTextbook service and I'd consider getting a Nexus 7 also if they have more availability.

Any insight is appreciated!

Click to expand...

I have gotten most all of my textbooks through Kno. The only thing that sucks is that you can't use your financial aid so you have to pay up front and wait for the refund. It's worth it to me though. It beats the hell out of lugging around 5 books around campus.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk 2

I used my ipad (graduated last year, but hey I am going to do a Masters next term) for textbooks, its awesome.

You get cheaper books, you can carry all of them (provided they are available on some form) and not worry about the weight or misplacing them (unless you lose your tablet). Also you can multitask, I used kindle (ebooks) or ibooks (pdf loading for those rare to find materials) and took notes at the same time, not to mention I recorded every complicated lesson and updloaded my notes and recordings to both dropbox and evernote.

Not to mention those awesome note taking apps and the fact that I could keep my schedule and calendar with notifications set up so I never forgot anything.

the ipad is an awesome gadget for school, not to mention you can sneak play angry birds or other games if the lesson gets boring.

My ipad helped me become the 2nd best student on the law faculty and I really began as the worst. if applied correctly the iPad will do wonders for your student life, not to mention entertained and connected.

inkling is the one i'm using on iOS. to be honest, it's not much cheaper than hardcopy (sometimes even much more expensive than those on amazon. for example, my haematology textbook is $59 on amazon, but on inkling it is $79.)

the only reason i bought them as ebook is because all of my textbooks are extremely heavy, i can't imagine myself carrying 20+ kg of textbooks every day. if you mostly use your textbooks at home, i don't see why you should get ebooks.

Yes you can go for the Nexus 7 it is good and will help you in your studies but if you are looking just for ebooks amazon kindle is the best option and it comes with a large screen as well.

nancyfromafrica said:

Yes you can go for the Nexus 7 it is good and will help you in your studies but if you are looking just for ebooks amazon kindle is the best option and it comes with a large screen as well.

Click to expand...

7 inches is not that big when compared with the ipad´s 9.7 screen, in my opinion you need the extra screen real state for a better experience. I dont mention the mini,s screen because the nexus one runs it over with its resolution.

But if going for the regular sized ipad I think iOS excels

There are places (at least one that I know of) that will scan your books for you for pretty cheap ($1 per every 100 pages, IIRC). They slice off the spine and send through a scanner, so you don't get your book back. You can specify from a number of digital formats. OCR is possible, but costs more.

Seems like the textbook economy must be a bloodbath in the last 10 years. Depending on your course of study, a single book may be hundreds of dollars. But at the very least you'd think multiple students are going in on a book and getting it digitized.

palpatine said:

Buy a used copy, tear it up, feed it through a scanner, and you have your textbook as a PDF.

It only takes a few minutes (depending on your scanner). The scanner is worth it, because you can use it to go paperless as well (syllabi, handouts, bills, receipts, etc. all available in the palm of your hand). I wouldn't buy an e-textbook even if it was available, because you actually have more control over it as a PDF (not locked into someone's DRM and app). As an added bonus, if you throw all of this into Evernote (handouts, class notes, etc.) it is all searchable and easily organized

Click to expand...

Sometimes I'll do this, but usually I just find loose leaf versions and scan those with my ScanSnap. I'm in law school and a good number of textbooks come in loose leaf. Sometimes I'll find a "used loose leaf" version on Amazon and you can tell the student before me just took off the binding themselves, haha. But either way, law school textbooks tend to be anywhere between 700-1100 pages, on average, and even that only takes me about a half hour to feed through my ScanSnap. I've never been able to get OCR working on such large files, but hopefully a future update to Acrobat will allow this.

After it's all scanned it goes into iBooks. Even though I don't use this feature all that much, it syncs the last page read to my iPhone, which is nice when I still need to finish my homework on the metro or something. Also looking forward to having it sync to my Mac with Mavericks. I probably won't be reading my books on there either, but I'm sure it will come in handy.

Anyway, I've been completely paperless since I started school, and I can't imagine doing it any other way. It's so nice knowing I always have everything I need and not having to carry a ton of books everywhere. The ScanSnap was definitely expensive but really worth it. I also scanned about 3,000 of my family's photos to keep them safe.