© American Society for Engineering Education, 2007 Preparing for Electronic Textbooks

Electronic copies of books are becoming increasingly common. Examples of these include noned-itable PDF files, or fully editable books based on the Wiki model17. Electronic books are well suited to engineering; they allow very fast updates, they are easy to access, they do not require the bulk of paper, they are easily searchable, and they allow multiple/alternate sources. So, this begs the question, why are there so few electronic books in use in higher education? In part, this is because many of the commercial books are not available electronically. Although some publishers are exploring ways to make their collections available electronically these efforts are still in their infancy. However, a larger puzzle is in the step away from paper to purely electronic media. For example, consider the following problems. How do you write notes or slip a page into a fixed PDF file? Is the document you are viewing on your machine or on the network? Who can change the docu-ment? What happens if somebody changes a homework problem after it was assigned? Etc. Assuming that the future of the electronic book is on-line there are currently two popular models. In the Distribution model there are a small number of authors and editors who control and distrib