eBook: A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science

Among the perks some faculty enjoy are getting free books, or at lease looking at free books.  Most of society probably would not describe this as a perk, but something of a workplace hazard similar to black lung disease or carpal tunnel syndrome.

For some of us books are treasures which keep on giving.  eBooks?  Well, ebooks done right have one undeniable advantage over regular print books: the search feature.

Although I dd not see this first hand, one of my college acquaintances told me about a favorite prof's library and the prof's uncanny ability to support his statements by quickly finding the book and the relevant passage in that book.  (The student's last name was Barnes, first name now forgotten.  I don't know if I ever knew the prof's name.)

Sometimes the prof just knew.  Barnes felt it must have been a quote he'd used many times.  Other times the instructor had marked the book, either his own index inside the cover or bookmarked pages.

But I've strayed.  It is possible for instructors to get access to books online.  Certainly, for reviewing a book for course selection, online should be fine, because most of the books arriving in faculty offices, especially for survey/distribution courses won't be adopted.

I'll skip the argument about glossy picture books pandering to functional undergraduate illiterates on one end of the scale and abstract, impenetrable tomes at the other, and get right to the point:  if a book's genesis came from notes written for a specific course the content is perfect for that course, but the audience is limited to the captive audience of that school.  Expanding the content to seek a wider audience and authors have to include material to make the book more salable.  Paradoxically, the effort to make the book more appealing may do just the opposite as an instructor may regard material outside their course assignment as superfluous and not worth their student's money.

But that's not why I started this post.  No?  No.  I've had two interesting experiences with ebooks.  In the first, the first several pages of A Balanced Introduction to Computer Science by David Reed present an interesting challenge for the reader.

It took a little bit before I realized that what I was seeing was not just a botched image, but text where the letters v,w, and y were missing.  And not just missing, but missing from only some segments or fonts in the text.  Looking at the example, you can see that "w" and "y" appear in the italicized text, but not the standard text.

One of my students in Engineering Drawing turned in several drawings which were missing some lines.  It turned out that those lines were missing from the ebook version of the text. It was as obvious as the difference between these two: