Clearly, the Reed faculty is working hard to
meet the challenges of new and emerging electronic tools and use them
to their students’ best advantage. Where is it all headed? Are textbooks
and chalkboards soon to be a thing of the past? And what about the college bookstore of the future? Are we in for shelf after shelf of digital chips? Not for a while, Colgrove says: “It’s still really hard to read material on a screen. According to the reports I’ve seen, people read up to 50 percent slower on screen than in print. Think about it: screen resolution is usually around 72 to 100 dots per inch, while an entry-level laser writer is 300. It’s hard on the eyes.” That’s one
reason web content tends to be brief and easy to grasp quickly. “Students
become adept at finding things on the web and their first instinct is
to look there,” Colgrove says, “but they can’t sit down
and read in the same way as a book—or get the same depth of information.”
As display technology matures in the next five to 10 years, she predicts,
we may see high-resolution electronic readers you can carry around. “A
college bookstore could be dramatically different.”
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