Late at night, a screen filled with words illuminated the dark space, red eyes staring at them trying to memorize them the night before tomorrow’s chapter quiz. While this has been described on numerous occasions, I have always liked paper textbooks better. This is because I cannot think of an aspect of my life where I don’t use a screen. I use my phone to wake up, I message people on my computer and all of my work is a digital submission. The nice thing about paper books is that they are a nice little break away from the screen, which I think is desperately needed in this day and age.
There are a lot of side effects from looking at screens for extended periods of time such as dry eyes and headaches. I have most definitely felt some effects of looking at screens for extended periods of time, and I have heard many people talk about how their eyes hurt after looking at screens. Why choose to use digital textbooks when there are physical disadvantages?
Some people prefer online textbooks because they aren’t as big of a burden to carry, but your computer thinks downloading a textbook is an even bigger burden. Have you seen how big a textbook PDF file is on the computer? My AP AMSCO European History book takes up 45.8 MB, which I personally think is a lot, but I’ve seen people download PDFs of the same textbook every time they need it. I cannot fathom how much storage is being lost just because they don’t look through it. In addition to that though you have your own personal photos and other things taking up storage. It’s common to lose storage because of photos and after adding the same textbook over and over again it can lead to your computer carrying a very heavy burden.
Highlighting and annotating books is one of my favorite studying methods. I started doing it in middle school and I’ve continued up to now, and while you may be able to annotate on an online textbook, it’s not the same. Handwriting is better than typing for memory if you write a short little summary in the margins, you’re more likely to remember it. To annotate a textbook, I like to draw stick figures depicting what is going on. The only online textbook type I could find that would allow you to draw is McGraw Hill and PDFs. However, I found this to be much harder than physically drawing it with a pencil.
It’s hard to deny that paper textbooks do not have specific advantages and personally I think sticking with paper textbooks is better than going to digital. It is much easier to use and while I think everyone should use whatever version of textbook they want, choosing paper textbooks is more flawless than using digital. The existence of “bad tech days” where computers just choose not to cooperate for some odd reason is not efficient for students. It could be a loading screen of death or glitchy Wi-Fi and you can’t open the textbook, but you can physical textbook will always be able to open without issue.
