iPad for Medical School Textbooks

[RockMed Doc]

Besides the schools that supply them and base their curriculums around their use, does anyone regularly use an iPad for their textbooks? If so, what do you think? Is the extra cost worth the ability to have all of your books in one small package? Where do you get your books from? Can you easily download lectures and power points?

I'm asking because I am thinking of pursuing this as an option next year. It seems like the cost could be justified simply by the ease of use and lack if bulk. I don't do a lot on annotating in textbooks anyway, so for me that wouldn't be an issue. Any thoughts and experiences would be much appreciated.

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[FSUseminoleEM1]

Besides the schools that supply them and base their curriculums around their use, does anyone regularly use an iPad for their textbooks? If so, what do you think? Is the extra cost worth the ability to have all of your books in one small package? Where do you get your books from? Can you easily download lectures and power points?

I'm asking because I am thinking of pursuing this as an option next year. It seems like the cost could be justified simply by the ease of use and lack if bulk. I don't do a lot on annotating in textbooks anyway, so for me that wouldn't be an issue. Any thoughts and experiences would be much appreciated.

I just posted about this in our school-specific thread. I'll be using iPad textbooks from here: https://www.inkling.com/store/category/medicine/

The texts are less expensive being digital downloads. You can sample a chapter from every book for free if you want. I used an e-book for Phys. Chem. II & found it extremely helpful to be able to swipe the iPad from Notability (awesome note-taking app) to the textbook, especially when the professor would say some dumb $#I^.

 

[Captain Fantastic]

My medical school library has subscriptions to online versions of most of the important textbooks for medical school. The only "text" I purchased was Robbins just because I thought I wanted it, and I could have used the online version just as easily for how I used it. And I didn't find reading online texts any easier on an iPad versus a notebook computer...especially when I was trying to copy and paste excerpts from the books into MS Word for the papers/learning objectives I was writing.

So where I went to school you still needed a regular computer for the other medical-school-stuff, and I didn't want to lug two devices around. I just stuck with the old MacBook and the iPad is at home for fun.

 

[LaEsponja]

The military has just started doing this with some of their training manuals- it made things TIMES easier for those of us who were semi-tech savvy. I hope the use of ipads and readers becomes more popular in all levels of schooling.

 

[Ven0m]

I use an ipad air for study. Long battery life. Bright, super clear screen. Zoom in on textbooks. Highlight and annotate. Search functions. Screenshot function. Connect to wifi and look up further info. Very portable. Not to mention it has a lot of other features.

 

[jqueb29]

I don't use an iPad (macbook), and I don't own any physical textbooks for class. Just have First Aid

 

[dermacat]

My graduate program (SMP) required both the graduate students and the medical students to all have iPad minis... they were never used. In fact, I don't think they even surfaced again after the first week. I do hear, though, that the iPad minis will be of greater use to us during our clinical rounds, as they fit nice into the pocket of your white coat and can be pulled out occasionally to look things up if need be.