Read all about it: Textbooks are still in

When Bob Crabb got his first look at the prototype of an electronic book reader 14 years ago, he would have bet his house that by now the bookstores he manages at the University of Minnesota would have gotten rid of most printed books.

Instead, he thought, they'd be selling PIN codes that could be used to access the publications electronically.

Fortunately for Crabb, he couldn't find anyone willing to take that bet. He still has his house, and his stores still have their books.

"I'm surprised by that," he admitted. "I thought that this generation of students, who grew up using electronic devices from the time they were in grade school, would have embraced this technology."

They certainly have in other areas. They communicate electronically, they shop electronically, they navigate electronically, many of them even manage their love lives electronically. But not all are reading their textbooks electronically.

Count U of M freshman Elin Mixer among them.

"I like textbooks," she said as she sat a table at the U's Coffman Union, a book open in front of her as she traded off between a highlighter and a pen she was using to jot notes in the margins.

U of M junior Sarah Crumrine sat in an overstuffed chair with a textbook plopped in her lap in another part of the student union.

"I like to have what I'm studying right in front of me," she said. "Having it on paper forces my attention. If I start looking at stuff online, I get distracted and end up on Facebook."

Keeping a distance from online distractions could be another reason that, at most, e-books account for about 4 percent of sales in college bookstores, and that's on campuses that are actively promoting them. Other colleges report that digital books make up as little as 1 percent of their sales.

About 10 percent of the casual reading market -- which has many more titles available -- involves e-books. And proponents argue that once more textbooks are transferred to the medium, sales will pick up.

But limited availability alone doesn't account for the tepid interest. In a recent study by the National Association of College Stores, 74 percent of college students said that, given a choice between an e-book and the traditional printed version of the same thing, they'd go old school.

E-books pose challenges

But e-books come with their own baggage, said Dan Bergeson, director of Carleton College's auxiliary services, including its bookstore, which is on the low end of the e-book sales spectrum.

"There are issues with standardization, both of content and format," he said. "And with a lot of these books, you're only gaining access to them for three months. It's not like a textbook that you can sell back to the bookstore or sell to a friend."

While an e-book is cheaper than a printed version initially, the ability to sell the book when the student is finished with it offsets most of those savings, Crabb said. And for students who print lots of pages from their e-books, "they're actually losing money by the time you factor in the [printer] toner."

Even the versions that can be downloaded and saved scare off some students, especially when it involves books in their major that they hope to keep for years. Having grown up in the e-age, they've seen how quickly formats can be discarded. Allegorically speaking, they don't want to end up with a pile of Beta videotapes in a DVR world.

'What they're used to'

But the biggest reason behind the slow acceptance of e-books is tradition. "The students grew up using printed books," Crabb said. "It's what they're used to."

The manufacturers of digital reading devices are scurrying to address the students' issues, particularly their desire to mark up the books.

"There are devices that allow you to highlight in multiple colors and make notes to yourself, but it's still a bit awkward," he said.

Besides, ultimately it's not the students that the manufacturers need to appease.