Ever since digital books became available, there has always been a debate about which is better: actual, physical books or their digital copies? Everyone has a different opinion on each of them, and for most books, they’re not that different from each other, other than the very obvious paper versus digital.

For the longest time, this was also true of textbooks. However, many people are now creating interactive e-textbooks, meant to engage the reader in the material. One new textbook, “Principles of Biology,” sounds like a fantastic online textbook. It is hosted on a website, and if you buy access to the website, you have the textbook for an unlimited time. Throughout the textbook, there are video and audio clips, and quizzes and other ways the reader can interact with the textbook, and as a result, hopefully better learning the material than they would have with a paper textbook (Eisenberg, “Making Science Leap From the Page“). I think, for many students, interactive textbooks like this, textbooks that make the reader apply the information as they are learning it, could be extremely helpful and successful.

The problem, however, is that most online textbooks do not allow this type of interactivity. Yes, they might have an audio or video clip here or there, but that doesn’t add much to the information already presented, other than possibly explaining the information slightly better. Many readers might even choose to skip over the clips, simply because they don’t want to spend the time. Unfortunately, there are an astonishing number of e-textbooks that don’t even have these clips; they are simply the paper version, offered in a digital format. For ten bucks more, I would much rather just have a hard copy.

Some people believe that digital books will become the dominate form of reading, making paper books completely useless. Personally, I don’t see it. I read in an article by Audrey Watters that Apple recently came out with textbooks for the iBookstore, which, basically, is the same type of digital reader that has been out for years now. But more than that, there’s nothing new. And, for me, there’s nothing about digital books that makes them better. I love having a physical book. I like turning the page. I can highlight and tag the pages however I want. It’s way easier for me to find a specific part of the book. And I can actually see how much more I have to read, which is something that I really like. Will digital books take over? I don’t know. Maybe. But unless we see something innovative, something new, I doubt it will happen in the next ten years.