Textbooks are placed in a lecture room at a medical school in Seoul, Aug. 4, 2025. Newsis
University students in Korea are increasingly swapping heavy printed textbooks for tablets and laptops, as e-book sales of course materials have more than quadrupled in the past four years, data showed Sunday.
Kyobo Book Centre said e-books accounted 29.9 percent of its online and offline university textbook sales by value last year, up from just 7.1 percent in 2021. The share has climbed steadily — 8 percent in 2022, 15.2 percent in 2023 and 23.1 percent in 2024 — even though print still generates more than three times the sales of digital textbooks.
Considering that e-books remain under 10 percent of overall book sales, the shift in the higher education textbook segment is particularly striking, the retailer noted.
Behind the trend are the literal burdens of printed books. One top-selling e-textbook, “Electronic Engineering Experiment 1” from Kyungpook National University Press, runs 602 pages and weighs about 1.5 kilograms. Many students say it's no longer practical to carry several such “brick books” across sprawling campuses.
Improved e-book platforms, which offer search, annotation and clipping tools, along with lower prices and semester-based rentals, are also driving adoption, as are publishers moving to digital-only editions amid piracy concerns and rising printing and logistics costs.
Yet education researchers warn that reading on screens still brings a small but consistent disadvantage in comprehension, especially for dense, expository texts common in college courses.
Meta-analyses have found that students tend to skim more, retain structure less clearly and overestimate how well they understand material when studying digitally, compared with print.
Universities should encourage deep reading strategies on devices and strike a balance, using print for the most demanding texts while leveraging e-books’ portability and accessibility, according to experts.
Source: Korea Times News
