The digital book in higher education : beyond the horseless carriage

This paper deals with the evolution of the book in the context of higher education. Digital books, or ebooks, need not be restricted to duplication of the printed page on a tablet device. As higher education embraces online learning, the tablet-based offerings from educational publishers will increasingly incorporate a variety of cloud-based learning activities and resources. These next-generation ebooks and etextbooks will look more like mobile apps than books. They will need to exchange data with a growing list of educational systems for student management, lesson planning, record keeping, learning analytics, assignment scheduling, massive open online course (MOOC) platforms, and so on. The Actionable Data Book project is a research and development effort undertaken this year to determine how to implement the added functionality required of educational ebooks in a way that will allow them to plug-and-play with other systems.