This is my dilemma as I approach medical school: eBooks vs. print books for studying?
I know it’s not necessary to buy many of the textbooks in medical school, but I will be buying some books, including books for board review. My only experience with textbooks is on the print side. I like the idea of being able to hold the book, flip the pages, etc. However, I also like the idea of having ALL my books on my iPad at once. I know this is a personal preference question, but wanted to see how others had fared.
So, for those of you who have used eBooks for classes, how did it go? Pros and cons?
Thanks!
Thanks everybody! Great discussion. I’m rather leaning toward what Kate said, eBook for big references, paper for other things. We shall see. Appreciate everybody’s comments. 
A side note – I just spent some time on Cornell’s curriculum page, and discovered that in addition to many of the first year’s books being available at the library (which I would expect), about half of them are viewable online, with appropriate log-in! No purchase necessary. So it looks like I’ll likely be using digital books, unless I desperately feel the need to own a particular title.
I literally just had this conversation with a colleague 10 mins ago, lol!!!
I think it depends on the subject matter and your comfort level with the material. As an example, I discovered that it’s best for me to have print books for my computer science (CS) classes because it’s all so new for me. With my biological and medical science books, my Ipad works just fine.
I like paper but have learned to be okay with ebooks. With programs like Goodreader, you can still highlight, write comments, etc like you would do on paper. Zooming in on images is nice too. If it’s a book I know I’ll really read (versus like a supplemental text) I may still go paper. I’m torn.
@kenmccallum wrote:
I’m torn.
This is EXACTLY how I feel. Working for a medical publisher (making my question slightly strange, I know), I see that the trend is toward digital/eBooks. I understand many reasons why. However, there are things I hate to give up about print. There’s something about how tangible it is. But I also hate carrying around heavy books … “torn” is precisely the way to put it.
Thanks for your input, both of you. It’s something we’ll just have to struggle through!
I would say for the big BIG books you might want to use as an adjunct reference, the ebook can be great due to the portability as you said. Cecil “Medicine”, for example. I have to say I went with paper for almost everything else. Also, most of the print texts had a link or a disc to an electronic version which gives you BOTH formats. I’m a “read-write” learner more than anything else so for me the physical book worked a lot better. Also better for many of the heavily illustrated texts. Just my 2-cents.
Kate
I like both, but to me the big advantage with print books is that you can buy used ones, or international editions that are often much cheaper.
Things to look forward to: my deployed doc brought along an EM procedures book that is hard back and probably about 4" thick. She opened it up and it’s also printed in size microscopic font. Seriously like a book of microfiche. That one I’d definitely go digital on…
@Doc201X wrote:
I literally just had this conversation with a colleague 10 mins ago, lol!!!
I think it depends on the subject matter and your comfort level with the material. As an example, I discovered that it’s best for me to have print books for my computer science (CS) classes because it’s all so new for me. With my biological and medical science books, my Ipad works just fine.
After thinking about this reply, I realized that I fogot to add something. :o
I annotate a LOT (the things I don’t know well) and to me, print books work MUCH better for that.
You may want to hold off on your purchases… If your med school is anything like mine, the students in the classes ahead of you will be giving away (or selling for cheap) and/or offering free electronic versions text books. I ended up only needing to buy 2 books my first year, and 1 my second year. This includes books for both board review and classes. And for many of the books, I was actually able to get both the hard copy and the electronic versions, which really is the best of both worlds – print for reading, and electronic is great for doing word searches for specific topics.
So on your second look visit, be sure to ask some of the current students the low down on what happens to their old books…
Opinion based upon post-bac studies not med school so YMMV…
I confess that I do like to have a real book in hand. However, the convenience of having texts on a single lightweight device as well as the ease with which I can make study guides has won me over to eBooks. I have Kindle on both the MacBook as well as the iPad. As I read, I use the clipping tool to take snapshots of pertinent diagrams, figures or summary tables and drop them into a document. As an example, with this technique I made my own catalog of organic mechanisms to study.
I went for ebooks for most, although, outside of coursework, I must admit that there is not much time to read. The material given to us goes beyond what is needed to know, and frankly beyond what I can memorize. Our syllabus for our Neuro block (year 2) was about 600 pages and we had about a little less than 3 weeks to memorize it. So it is pretty intense. I used acrobat to highlight (or Okular under linux).
I actually bought a few books this year, some that you will probably have to buy - Robbins Pathology, First Aid (step 1) and a few more. I bought most of my books as international edition (i.e. the Robbins is about 90+ in the US, and I paid $35 - new - as international). I have bought books that I have merely opened, simply because there is very little time to go outside of the material provided in class (note that I have 2 kids, one is preschool and one in elementary school) and this makes my days quite short (7-8 am to 4 pm when I am lucky, plus 1 extra hour after 8:30 pm, but since I wake up at 5:30 every morning, by 9 pm, I am quite unable to perform any productive work)…