AFRO-NETS> Review of Essential Textbooks for Health Professionals in Africa (4)

[Roger Drew <rogerdrew@rogerdrew.free-online.co.uk>]

Review of Essential Textbooks for Health Professionals in Africa (4)
--------------------------------------------------------------------

This is a very important and interesting question which Bob Mayes and 
Margaret Anaminyi have raised and I would be interested in hearing 
views on this as part of the review I am doing.

A few thoughts that people might like to comment on:

1. Changing environment - no doubt the current environment is very 
different from 40 years ago when ELBS (BookPower's predecessor) was 
established. The emergence of IT is a key one. How has this affected 
the need for textbooks in training of health professionals in Africa? 
A survey carried out by BookPower in 2000/1 was reported as showing 
that the vast majority of students saw textbooks and a well-stocked 
library as their main sources of information. What do you think?

2. Accessibility - there are access issues for both books and elec-
tronic media. I would be very interested to hear any particular stu-
dent experiences of these. For students, are books or computers more 
accessible? Is this changing?

3. Competition or Synergy? - often printed and electronic media are 
set against each other, as if one is competing with each other. I 
would be very interested to hear of examples of where printed and 
electronic media are being used together for training purposes

4. Copyright issues - one of the major barriers to the idea put for-
ward by Bob is that material in books is copyright and publishers get 
their profits by selling books. Anything which undermines those sales 
is not going to be supported by publishers. Consequently, they are 
unlikely to be willing to make copyright material, such as that pub-
lished in books, available electronically. Views and experiences of 
this would be most welcome.

Currently, I think the view within BookPower would be that it is not 
planning to work with/through electronic media for a combination of 
reasons including:

* the distinctive nature of the scheme and the skills and competen-
  cies of BookPower
* others are already involved in the IT field and have skills and
  competencies in that area
* the 'fact' that textbooks remain the main source of information for
  most students in Africa
* the 'fact' that publishers would not be willing to make copyright
  material available electronically

However, I think part of the nature of the review is to critically 
examine some of these things - so feel free to comment.

Thanks for the interesting feedback I am receiving.

Roger Drew
Health and Development Consultant
9a The Green
Mendlesham Green
Stowmarket IP14 5RQ, UK
Tel: +44-1449-768-947
Fax: +44-1449-767-868
Mobile: +44-781-275-3152
mailto:roger@mendlesham.fsnet.co.uk

--
To send a message to AFRO-NETS, write to: afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe, write to: majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
in the body of the message type: subscribe afro-nets OR unsubscribe afro-nets
To contact a person, send a message to: afro-nets-help@usa.healthnet.org
Information and archives: http://www.afronets.org