iPads in Medical Education – Apple Experts Roundtable, Amsterdam, Dec 14th, 2015

Being librarians, we buy or license e-books. Well, some libraries are getting into publishing – through repositories or OJS journal servers. But producing e-books, and competing with textbook publishers like Elsevier and Thieme? Is that any of our business?

Yes, why not? Programs like iBooks Author – a free-to-download programme from Apple – or, as a platform for a whole university press, Open Monograph Press from the Public Knowledge Project, allow all of us to produce e-books, even with multimedia and interactive content. Jochen Bretschneider from Vrije Universiteit Medical Centre in Amsterdam showed how as part of their ‘Mobile Learning Initiative‘ he and his team turn lecture notes into ibooks and enrich them with videoed surgical procedures, interactive elements etc.

We librarians spend huge and probably unsustainable amounts of money on e-books the vast majority of which make no use of the benefits the on-line platform offers (and quite a few even come in infuriating DRM restricted formats). At the same time quite a lot of teaching materials that our academics have created in-house, are dumped in poor formats in remote corners of Virtual Learning Environments or course websites. Wouldn’t it be worth setting a small proportion of our e-book budget aside, to allow our academics to experiment with the e-book format? Some of the content might turn out more useful than the e-books we have been licensing for so many years…

Is the iPad the successor to the printed textbook?

Oliver Obst reported the findings from a large-scale iPad trial in Münster – a project he first mentioned at the 2013 AGMB conference in Berlin, the outcome of which many of us have been eagerly awaiting.

With the transition of journals to the on-line format completed, the Münster ZB Medizin investigated the potential of a similar conversion of student textbooks. A survey amongst students showed strong penetration of traditional (i.e. print) textbooks, complemented with on-line (multiple choice) training materials, lecture notes and on-line textbooks. Students tend to use the lecture notes in electronic format, annotating them and sharing them within their revision groups through cloud services.

The Münster library decided to build on the popularity of the tablet as a learning and revision tool, and piloted loanable, pre-loaded iPads (85 of them!) alongside content bundles for download to students’ personal iPads (70 of those). Students quickly adopted the iPad, even changing their revision habits to make best use of the new tool. The learning tools also integrate with external tools, such as communication or calendar.

So is the iPad the heir to the throne? Oliver Obst’s answer was along the lines that – although each medium was so unique there was never a 100% successor to anything -, the iPad integrates the functions of the textbook with many additional ones. A future device that expands the capabilities of the platform even further, might, indeed, replace the printed textbook for good. However, the big hurdle of making content available, in the form of site-licensed apps, will have to be overcome.

A source of endless frustration: e-books

It seemed so simple: instead of shifting piles of printed books every day, libraries would license core textbooks on-line, and students would read them on their own devices. No more queues for core texts during exam preparation, no more anatomy atlasses hidden inbetween Geology, no need any longer to preserve copies of the past edition for the busiest times of year.

But in real life, e-books turned out a nightmare. Why does one e-book from publisher X open on the iPad, while another one doesn’t? Does the viewer which e-books from a certain set from publisher Y require, allow printing chapters? Why is there no viewer for that publishers’ titles for Android? There’s a ‘Download’ button showing which doesn’t do a thing – what’s that good for? How do I get this e-book into Colwiz, for sharing notes with my revision group? Are you sure that’s not possible at all? I’ve got these anatomical images on my tablet now, but isn’t it daft they aren’t three-dimensional?

Especially since iPads have made their entry, students would be prepared to try even core textbooks in the on-line format. But at the same time, students are IT-savvy enough not to put up with all the limitations publishers impose on their content. And this includes not just all the DRM hurdles, but also the limited functionality: students expect e-books to make good use of the capabilities of their tables, from advanced handling of images (zooming, turning by 360º…) to sharing annotations in the cloud. And they certainly won’t put up with e-books that can only be viewed in a special reader, one page at a time…

Overall, e-books have, so far, been a pretty disappointing experience for our readers. It is about time we listen to their frustration, and make it plain to publishers what we expect in return for a share of our budget. We’ve done it with Thieme – they now accept that their former e-book format (which required Flash, i.e. wouldn’t open on the iPad) was a mistake; and, at long last, Thieme e-Books are now available in a Flash-free format. Let’s make sure other publishers, too, begin to take our readers’ needs more seriously!