Can technology cure weighty problem of too many schoolbooks?

When I was at school we had a locker for our books. These days more and more students have the cloud. Irish schools have been gradually embracing digital technology, and ebooks have become an integral part of how the curriculum is delivered to more than 25,000 students at about 130 schools. The main motivation is ergonomic: at Junior Certificate level, for example, studying 13 core subjects means having at least 13 core texts.

International studies suggest that teenagers should carry no more than 10 per cent of their body weight on a regular basis, but Irish students have often been carrying more than 20 per cent to and from school each day. So loading digital versions of all those textbooks on to ereaders can take a lot of weight from their shoulders.

Students who use ebooks are benefiting from textual enhancements, too. Edco’s etextbooks for primary and secondary students, for example, feature animated diagrams and audio clips. While swotting up on biology you can see the life cycle of the fern unfold in three-dimensional form. In the English etextbooks you can hear a poem as well as read it.

Interactive functions make studying easier too, allowing you to highlight text, make notes, search, and bookmark passages. There are also links to previous exam questions and solutions. Essentially, the etextbook offers all you need for revision in a single location, with the added benefit of access to material from any computer with an internet connection.

Although it certainly streamlines the experience of studying, the Edco model doesn’t guarantee results. It is also an expensive solution to the problem of heavy schoolbags. Ebooks are subject to VAT at 23 per cent, which printed textbooks are exempt from, and then there is the cost of the ereader.

Split the difference

What might be a more economical solution comes from the radical approach offered by Book Splits, whose device (booksplits.ie, €5.99) enables you to split a book in half, rebind it and then recover it. I’m not sure it’s something this book-lover could stomach.

Outside the core curriculum, Leabharlann is a new initiative being offered by Interleaf technology to supplement the etextbook market with a library of literature that complements postprimary reading requirements.

Using the Overdrive technology already in use at many public libraries, it holds more than 1,000 titles for secondary students, including those taking the new Junior Cert curriculum.

The idea is to enable schools to build elending collections for their students without the enormous expense of establishing their own libraries, so Leabharlann acts as a central library. The schools pay a flat annual charge (€650) and can then choose ebooks that best suit their students’ needs. Essentially, they get to put together their own collections, with Leabharlann shouldering most of the administrative and start-up cost.

Schools can also access “circulation metrics”, which allow them to see who is reading what – in theory, as the act of checking out and reading are not necessarily one and the same.

Leabharlann went live this last month, and there have been some teething problems, although they are to do with the curriculum rather than with the technology; apparently, several of the titles on the new Junior Cert curriculum are unavailable both in paperback and in digital form. The Leabharlann collection is available to view at leabharlann.overdrive.com

Bad handwriting

In the UK, the British Library has got on board giving digital support to postprimary students. It recently launched Discovering Literature (bl.uk/romanticsandvictorians), an online resource tailored to GSCE and A-level curriculums. It is available to anyone with an internet connection, however, so Irish students can also browse an early draft of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, or see the bad handwriting in Christina Rossetti's original manuscripts.

At the moment the collection is limited to the Victorians and Romantics, but it easy to see how well the delivery of other primary sources might work.

If physical artefacts fail to inspire, the library offers an enormous amount of other resources, too: teaching notes, more than 100 articles by leading scholars, and audio-visual material that includes 25 documentary films that bring to life the atmospheric locations and locutions of authors such as Horace Walpole, Emily Brontë and Charles Dickens.

Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats, the exhibition at the National Library of Ireland, would serve as a brilliant basis for a similar initiative here. All of the resources are already assembled, many in digital or easily digitised form, from touch-screen manuscripts to documentary films and recorded versions of the poems. The library offers free guided tours to secondary students; creating a complementary online resource would open up its riches to those unable to travel. The library's Dublin Lockout resources (nli.ie/lockout), compiled last year for the centenary of the labour strike, and still available online, offer a good template.

Anything that helps to get students excited about books, in physical or in digital form, should be treated as matter of the highest importance.