TR PHOTO BY LOGAN METZGER
With the creation of ebooks and audio books, many readers are now drifting toward reading online materials rather than heavy print books.

New technology is coming out on the scene daily, whether it be robot vacuum cleaners, home assistants or virtual reality. The way people read has also been evolving in recent years and the way students in Marshalltown read has emerged with the use of online textbooks and audiobooks. But not everyone is changing over from print books so quickly.

The Marshalltown Public Library offers not only its large print selection to students, but also a large selection of ebooks and audiobooks through the use of different apps and MP3s.

Three of these apps are hoopla, libby and tumblebooks. The Marshalltown Public Library has pamphlets on all of these apps available at the checkout desk.

“For kids who are learning to read or kids who want to read higher level books, having an audiobook paired with a print book is a pretty good practice,” said Joa LaVille, the youth services director for the Marshalltown Public Library.

LaVille said many older students, in the middle school to high school age range, who are avid readers are very adamant about having print books rather than ebooks, even if it is easier to use their phone to read a book they still like the nostalgia of a physical book.

“In May of this year was actually the first time I had a student request an ebook,” LaVille said. “That’s a sign to me that more requests may be coming, but students are still interested in print.”

At Marshalltown High School, teachers live in a constantly evolving state trying to tend to the needs of each individual student. In the classroom of Christopher Sutch, an English teacher at Marshalltown High School, students use both electronic and print materials.

“I almost always have material that originates in an electronic format that students are supposed to read,” Sutch said. “Students will usually ask for print copies and I always try to make that happen for them.”

Sutch also said that with some books that come in print copies, students will go online to find the PDF in Spanish because they read better in Spanish.

“In my experience, most students do not like to read electronically,” Sutch said. “There is just something about the experience of holding a book in your hand that is satisfying.”

Sutch also brought up how students enjoy browsing and handling books before choosing to read them, which is something that they cannot get online.

In the classroom of Naomi Musal, a French teacher at Marshalltown High School, students do a lot with online text but they also create and read print books.

“In my French classes they have a new online textbook that comes with an online bookshelf with like a bajillion [booklets] that are leveled with glosseried words,” Musal said. “The cool thing about all these is that they are audiobooks as well.”

Along with the textbook, students also use iCulture, which is a program where students can learn about songs, news, and about locations in French.

Musal also has physical booklets available for students to read, which she says is a big component of her French classes. Another large part of Musal’s classes is story writing, where students create mini books in French that stay with Musal in her classroom library and other students can read them.

“This was the first year that I jumped in with this much reading in French,” Musal said. “And we have made a lot of progress.”

Musal says students give mixed reviews about the online textbook, but largely they enjoy the enhancements of the read alouds and not having to lug around the heavy print textbook. For free reading, Musal sees many students going for print books except in the cases of students wanting anime and manga.

In the classroom of Jocelyn Frohwein, an English teacher at Marshalltown High School, a lot of reading is done online.

“A lot of resources for my video production and drama classes are online,” Frohwein said. “But for script analysis we use print copies.”

Frohwein said how students want to read varies depending on the student.

“I had one student who loved the smell of books, the feel of books, just the way the paper felt when she turned the page,” Frohwein said. “Then I have some techy kids who if you put a book in front of them they would look at it like it’s a foreign object.”

The future

LaVille said she doesn’t see physical books completely disappearing, at least not her lifetime she said.

“There are so many times when you are browsing [for books] that what you are looking for shifts,” LaVille said. “You can’t get that online.”

Sutch said he could see print books being dropped eventually for either their costs or environmental concerns, but not anytime soon.

“Bookstores are not just selling like they used to, publishing houses are going out of business,” Frohwein said. “I think our industry has changed.”

Frohwein said Marshalltown High School is already phasing out books, not only in classrooms but also in the library.

“I don’t need more than two copies of what I have because everything I need is online,” Frohwein said.

Benefits of ebooks

LaVille said ebooks are good for reading accommodations, such as large print, text color change, highlighting, background color change and some can read the text to you.

Sutch said finding space to store print books can be hard within a school, especially textbooks which can be large.

“If you’re traveling and you want to take six books with you and you can have them on your phone, why in the world would you go through the trouble of packing them,” Sutch said.

The textbook Musal uses within her French class reads to her students, it also allows students to highlight and add notes right on the page. It is also a lot lighter and portable than a print textbook.

“Digital text is a lot easier because we carry our phones around all the time,” Musal said. “So if you have connectivity that means you have literally 20,000 books at your disposal.”

Frohwein said with the right resources she can take students virtually to other countries to see landmarks and first edition books, which is impossible with a print book.

Drawbacks of ebooks

“I think [changing to having completely online books] would isolate people,” LaVille said. “And there are so many ways people are already isolated in our world.”

Sutch said print books are just easier to read, and ebooks sometimes cause his students headaches or they complain about having to squint at the screen to read.

“You need to know your history and I think having hard copies is our history,” Frohwein said, when explaining why completely phasing out and getting rid of print books would be harmful.