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  • 30/09/2016

    Nick Carr writes about e-textbooks, quoting research that students don’t like them, or at least they prefer conventional textbooks. Seems reasonable to me. We know a lot more about the design of conventional textbooks, layout, indexing, and interaction and so on. But for dermatology it seems to me e-textbooks offer a way forward. If you want to learn dermatology, you have to look at images, and to do this well, you need access to lots and lots of images. One of the conclusions of a paper we published several years ago was how few instances of a particular disease students are exposed to. Seeing only n of 1 for a particular lesion type is just not enough: imagine your sole idea of what a ‘dog’ is, was based on only seeing one poodle. Current publishing models and norms mean that most dermatology textbooks are short on images — and often the images they contain are poor. E-textbooks are one way round this, and it is difficult to look at an iPad and not wonder what a good dermatology text would like like on it. What will be really interesting is what will happen to the legacy publishers given the price sensitivity of undergraduate students and the lower barriers to entry.

    Annotation and memory of position on the page are important issues, but I doubt invention will not improve things. Just look at the way the ‘clunky’ Kindle allows you to highlight text, then retrieve it on the Amazon web site and go back to the text at the various bookmarks. A scholars dream for encouraging accurate referencing and citation.

    In the meantime keep reading skincancer909^^ and my online material! Lots of room for improvement however.

    ^^ Skincancer909 is currently being rewritten and the future version will incorporate video with a new design.