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Every month or two, there’s mention of the E-Book revolution, and the consensus usually tends to remain in the favor of traditional books. However, some people are taking the E-Book issue out of the casual reader’s hands, and putting it into the hands of college students.

Reading a novel on my computer remains something I dislike, though using learning material online is something I’m much more fond of. When I took my Intro. to Psychology class as an undergraduate, our text book was in HTML format, and this made searching for key words incredibly easy. When I took a couple Distance Learning classes later on, a good deal of my interaction with other students was via an online medium.

The problem remains in the level of interactivity. A message board is only so useful, since ideas need to be pushed back and forth before a complicated argument or discussion can have any true conclusion, while real-time interaction allows one to quickly skip tangental remarks.

The E-Book revolution (everything’s a revolution nowadays, isn’t it?) is one that may very well seep into other niche areas. For example, I was amazed to see roleplaying game publisher White Wolf sell their out-of-print sourcebooks in E-Book format. In my opinion, this is great for two reasons: one, collectors and game fanatics can obtain, in at least one form, texts no longer available, and two, players can have easily-accessible books in which to search for rules and other reference data without leafing through fifty books. The only thing that can make this better would be for publishers to release E-Book versions of their material before said material is out-of-print.

Of course, the bag of worms this opens could be rather unpleasant. Would people be more likely to pirate E-Books and not buy bound paper versions if these books were available in both formats? I’m guessing White Wolf thinks so.

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