Dear Editor,
I am writing to reply to Pat Chan’s letter about electronic readers replacing paper textbooks with electronic readers. I am afraid I disagree with Pat Chan’s points about electronic readers and paper textbooks. I believe that using an electronic reader can bring benefits to us. For example, students do not have to carry big and heavy paper books to school. However, it also creates a lot of problems to us.
Introducing electronic readers into school curriculum is too costly. The government needs to spend money providing software, hardware and training courses to schools. This investment is not one-off. For the poor students, they may have a burden of buying the reading device to download materials. The cost of using electronic readers is, therefore, unforeseeable. Pat also stated that students can store all the materials in the electronic reading device, but if the reader is stolen, the student will lose all the ‘books’ and ‘notes’. It may cause a greater loss.
Using paper textbooks does not require any technology, and not cause any technical problems. We can take notes whenever we need. However, when we use electronic readers, they require Internet access and electricity at the same time. We may need to spend time seeking help or technical support. When the electronic readers run out of battery, we may not able to get anything from our ‘textbooks’. Is it still convenient for us?
It is not suitable for all students to use the electronic readers. How can we expect all kindergarten kids and primary school students to use the electronic readers? They are too young to handle the readers. Although all they need is just a few clicks to look for information, this still causes inconvenience to some children. They may affect the progress of the class. If they spend the same hours reading books on electronic readers as reading paper textbooks, this can cause eye diseases which will affect students’ health.
Some may claim that carry around the heavy school books is not convenient. However, if this type of textbooks can help us enrich knowledge better, it is worth keeping traditional paper textbooks. Therefore, I disagree with Pat’s point on replacing paper textbooks with electronic readers
Yours faithfully,
Chris
Chris Wong