The eTextReader Project

The eTextReader project seeks to integrate and extend the best features of paper textbooks, while simultaneously taking advantage of the electronic medium to extend reading in new ways. Many electronic book projects seek to replicate the experience of reading from paper. While we believe that being "backward compatible" with paper is important, we don't believe that doing so will provide much motivation to change to electronic texts. More importantly, we believe that stopping at replicating paper does a great disservice to the educational opportunities made possible by storing the content and reader annotations electronically.

We have implemented an application called the eTextReader to test whether the enhancements afforded by an electronic text can help students learn more. Written in Java and run on the Tablet PC platform, the application has been used in classes two different courses at Hope College: a year's offering of the Introductory Computer Science course and the Programming Languages course.

Currently, the eTextReader is being updated and put into a form in which it can hopefully be used by others.

This web site is currently under construction; we apologize for its lack of visual appeal!