A study conducted by LightSail Education shows that educators are leaning towards fully adopting ebooks in the classroom, which indicates a healthy future for companies who build them.

“A new survey of 475 educators indicates that schools and districts see their use of classroom materials transitioning substantially from paper books to digital books over the next two years, according to LightSail Education,” reports the ESchoolNews article.

The study, conducted in January, revealed that K-12 decision makers predicted a massive growth of ebooks by answering a few questions related to where the ebook use is now and where they think it will be in two years.

It was revealed that “94% of respondents predicted an increase in the next 2 years, 59% report that ebooks currently account for fewer than 10% of books read and 52% expect that, within two years, ebooks will account for more than 40% of books read.”

Even more interesting, when the respondents were asked what they would prefer between paper books and ebooks, 245 responded with a preference in ebooks while just 37 showed a preference in paper books, according to the study.

“With a record 10 million tablets and computers sold into US schools last year, district leaders and decision makers are gearing up to make a major shift to from print to digital,” said Gideon Stein, Founder and CEO of LightSail Education, according to ESchoolNews.

“The results of this survey strongly suggest that schools are looking to build digital libraries where they own their content outright rather than experiment with models like book rentals or subscriptions.”

While there was enormous feedback pointing to the growth of ebooks, there were a few concerns highlighted that include: “challenges finding all desired titles in ebook format, ensuring that the reading experience honors pedagogical needs, ensuring that students accessing ebook libraries, overall cost of transition to ebooks and access to ebooks across platforms.”

Building a library of ebooks could prove to be more cost efficient for schools and much more efficient for students who grow tired of lugging heavy textbooks around in their backpack.

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Article by Navindra Persaud, Education World Contributor.