2021 Volume 71 Issue 1 Pages 2-7
Digitalization of teaching tool has been gradually penetrating in Japan’s educational field. There are now electronic textbooks, digital textbooks, electronic journals and electronic academic books. While ways and purposes of utilizing those collectively called electronic books are wide-ranging, file formats for those e-books are mainly EPUB3 and PDF. Digital textbooks have just started to be introduced in elementary and secondary education in tandem with major innovative changes in teaching and classroom managements. Although digitization of university libraries has been implemented as a part of the educational revitalization at universities, Japan is far behind the European countries and the United States. This paper provides Japan’s digitization situations from the viewpoint of existing conditions of and problems inherent in those main file formats. The revision of the Copyright Law should be regarded as an opportunity for innovative services. Through analyses of the usage and methods of electronic textbooks, the ultimate objective of this paper is to consider what the future education should look like.
