Will online content replace textbooks?

When I was a pupil at school the beginning of a new academic year typically meant being issued a new set of textbooks. The teacher would call each pupil to the front of the class, where they would be solemnly presented with a stack of heavy books, being sternly instructed by the master to carefully inscribe their name on the inside front covers. We would spend much of the first lesson carefully wrapping these books in a protective covering, and I recall being rather sorry to do this, as I liked the garish covers and bold titles, and felt it was wrong to obscure them with a dull sheet of brown paper.

I now see that we were protecting a valuable commodity - with each pupil possessing about 10 different textbooks, it made good sense for school to hope that these books could be used for a number of years. I know that any pupil who lost one of their books could expect a severe reprimand, and though I mislaid virtually everything, from pens, to sports equipment and calculators throughout my time at school, I never lost a textbook, so afraid was I of the consequences.

Over the last 10 years there has been a gradual move away from textbooks, and towards electronic forms of data representation: computers, tablets, and the internet of course, have encroached onto the domain of hard copied paper, but is it a move for the better?

Online media certainly has many advantages over textbooks: instead of scouring through an index, then flicking through the pages to find a few relevant lines, pupils can use google, that most ubiquitous of search engines (the index of our age) to find an abundance of academic data on virtually any topic. It would perhaps be more difficult to find a topic that would yield less than a hundred results on google than one that brings up more than a million. The internet certainly seems to win out over texts books in sheer scope of information - but more information brings with it the task of knowing which information to select, and which to disregard. If you are investigating a certain topic, and a search engine presents you with a million web pages, how do you know which ones to use? There is little way to asses the credibility of the majority of the information, and a discerning eye is needed to check the sources, or establish the veracity of online articles.

A text book doesn`t seem to be afflicted with these particular handicaps: with the author`s name on the cover, and any contributing writers clearly listed in black and white, one may be more inclined to cite and quote the steadfast words printed a text book, as opposed to the flickering words that appear on computer screen. Academic publishing houses such as Oxford, Cambridge or Routledge will demand a high scholastic level before they even consider producing the work, while a website can be produced by anyone, and put online without any quality appraisal. This is not to say that there is no credible online academic content, but it can be difficult to sort the good from the bad, especially if your search brings up millions of results.

Online content does have a certain advantage that print media can never compete with, as it can be updated at any hour of any day to reflect new developments or discoveries. I can remember a physics textbook used at school, and how our teacher told the class to turn to a certain page, which displayed a familiar drawing of an atom. The centre of the diagram showed the protons and neutrons crammed tightly together, and travelling round this planetary core a number of electrons made an elliptical orbit. Our teacher then asked us to do something astonishing - we were instructed to cross out a whole section of text. At first none of believed what we were hearing, and the teacher had to command us more sternly to `cross out the section that has now been proven to be incorrect.` With a ruler we hesitantly scored through a number of lines that declared protons, neutrons and electrons to the smallest particles of matter. This was apparently no longer true, since various subatomic particles (leptons, quarks, and other strange sounding entities) had been discovered.

Textbooks can become obsolete, while online media can remain fresh and up to date. Anyone picking up an old atlas may struggle to locate Kosovo, Montenegro, or South Sudan, while they may see the names of a number of countries, such as Yugoslavia, East Germany and the U.S.S.R, that sound very unfamiliar. An online map - from a credible source of course - would never suffer from these problems, and they could even provide ancillary real time data, such as weather reports, and road traffic information.

Online resources can also provide interactive learning features, posing questions to students, who can enter their answers on screen, and instantly discover if they are correct. Video and audio content can also be included, which may prove to be extremely effective learning tools. Textbooks will of course contain questions for pupils, but they may feel less involved in the process if they have to turn to the back of the book each time to check the answer.

There are pros and cons to both online and print media, and there is no reason why one should supersede the other. We are very fortunate that printing has become economical, and books themselves are not the luxury they were in the past, with only the privileged being able to afford them. We are equally fortunate that most of the country has access to the internet, and home computers are not the hulking devices they were only a few decades ago, while being priced far beyond the means of the average household.