Incoming dental students' expectations and acceptance of an electronic textbook program

Since 2005, the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center School of Dentistry has required the VitalSource Technologies, Inc. Bookshelf as the textbook program for all dental students. In a 2008 survey, four classes of dental students expressed dissatisfaction with most features of the bookshelf. With the expectation that incoming students would be more accustomed and amenable to digital textbooks and to further determine student attitudes toward electronic textbooks, we developed two surveys for first-year dental students in the class of 2013. The sixty-five first-year students received a survey (S1) one week before they were introduced to the e-textbook program. Questions centered on their undergraduate experience with e-books and their expectations of studying with an electronic textbook collection. In the second survey (S2), sent nine months later, the questions focused on students' opinion of the VitalSource Bookshelf. Forty-five students (69.2 percent) completed the S1 survey. Of those, thirty-six (80 percent) responded that they never used e-textbooks in college. Of the nine students who responded that they used e-books, only two liked them without reservations. The response rate to S2 increased to fifty students (77 percent). After using VitalSource for nine months, thirty-three students (66 percent) indicated a preference for reading print textbooks, compared to forty-seven students (57.3 percent) of the four classes surveyed in 2008. Although we expected incoming dental students to have had previous experience with e-textbooks, only nine students had used e-books in college courses. Few students indicated preference for e-textbooks, and over half of the group was undecided. After experience with VitalSource for first-year courses, students indicated that they like VitalSource for the ability to search for specific topics across the entire collection of dental books, but not for reading large amounts of text.