Abstract:

Traditional book publishers have greatly contributed to students’ learning. However, recently, the concept of electronic publishing (e-publishing) has emerged and became one of the most popular topics in academia and the business world. This phenomenon is fuelled by the need for innovation, rapid technology development, complexity of business environments, and the change in people’s mindset and lifestyle but its influence on student learning has not been well explored.

People in general learn differently from one another. Each person has his/her own preferred learning styles. Consequently, it is crucial for the book publishers to know students’ preferred learning styles because the learning media that they provide, either in the forms of printed books or digital books, will directly affect the students’ learning performance. Little work has been done explicitly to address whether digital books have a positive effect on students and whether e-publishing should be the future of the book publishing industry.

The present study investigated 326 students’ preferred learning styles through the use of questionnaires and experiments. Surveys were initially completed and then experiments were conducted to examine students’ learning performance when they learnt using various media that supported their visual, auditory, read/write or kinaesthetic learning style, or a combination of these approaches. Finally, a test was administered regarding their learning performance and this was then compared to their learning styles. As a result, it was found that, regardless of a student’s preferred learning styles, students who use media that support multiple learning styles, attained an almost 25 percent higher average mark than those who use media that only support a single learning style.

Traditional book publishers primarily concentrate on textual books with very limited multimedia content, to reduce costs [12]. However, based on the findings, this research suggests that book publishers should adopt e-publishing methods by incorporating illustrations, videos, music or other applications in a digital book to support people’s multiple learning styles, promoting higher learning performance.

Keywords:

e-publishing, Book Publishing, Printed Books, Digital Books, Learning Style, Learning Performance.