Dear Sir,
I am writing to reply to the letter sent by Pat Chan, in which he wrote that replacing traditional books by electronic books was beneficial to students. Though Mr. Chan thought that the benefits to students brought by e-books would be enormous, it appears to me that traditional books are still better teaching and learning tools for our society.
Despite the benefits brought by e-books, they are too costly for the general public, and some students may not be able to afford the high price. Besides the e-books themselves, parents also have to purchase relevant complements such as Internet service, various software as well as repairing service, causing the cost to add up to thousands of dollars. Such heavy cost will undoubtedly compound some families’ financial problems and parents have to bear even heavier burden than before if e-books replace paper textbooks completely.
On top of that, the introduction of e-books may lead to interruption of lessons due to numerous potential technical problems. As e-books are made of electronic devices, they are easily affected by the surrounding environment, and may not function properly in certain conditions, such as high temperature, high relative humidity, etc. With these possible technical problems, both teachers and students may have to spend much precious teaching time in lessons to cope with the e-books before teaching can be resumed. The entire teaching schedule is then interfered, and it becomes more difficult for the classes to catch up the syllabus in the year. Meanwhile, traditional paper textbooks are much less likely to be obstacles blocking the smooth conduction of lessons and thus are better teaching tools.
Some readers may argue that traditional books equal overweight school bags to pupils, but what they overlook is that many publishers have already been selling textbooks which are divided into small booklets in the market for years. Therefore, on no account is the introduction of e-books always the only measure to solve the problem of overweight bags. In contrast, these improved paper textbooks may be even lighter than the portable electronic device!
In conclusion, traditional books are still better than electronic books for teaching. I hope that this letter will change some readers’ attitude towards traditional books.
Yours truly,
Chris Wong