Feasibility study of PDF based digital textbooks for university students with difficulty to handle print textbooks

Digital Textbooks have been developed by using electronic editing format such as Epub and DAISY so far, and have been gradually introduced as alternative textbooks for print textbooks from elementally schools to high schools in Japan. However, almost no standard print textbooks have been used in universities of Japan. In addition, there have been few media centers that had services to convert a print textbook to a digital textbook for university students with difficult to handle print textbooks. Although it is not so difficult to make digital textbooks by using electronic editing system, it will not be easy task to make this kind of digital textbooks for all teachers in universities. In these circumstances, the use of a tablet terminal, as digital textbooks reader, with PDF files of print textbooks is considered as the one of realistic solutions of this problem. The purpose of our study to confirm whether PDF based digital textbooks has potential as alternative textbook for university students with difficulty to handle print textbooks. An experiment has been performed as the first step of this research, and the obtained data was analyzed by NASA-TLX. From the result, it was indicated that the digital textbooks can be used with less efforts than print textbooks. Especially, there were significant differences in Physical Demand, Temporal Demand and Frustration, between the digital textbooks and the print textbooks. This result indicates the potential of digital textbook that have PDF files of print textbooks, as alternative textbooks for the university students with difficulty to handle print textbooks.