E-books are replacing textbooks at educational institutions worldwide. The effectiveness of e-books depends on factors such as design, interactivity, richness of content, and students’ perceptions of the benefits they gain or think they gain. This study aimed to investigate the effect of e-books on learning technological course content and assess preservice student teachers’ perceptions of the usefulness of e-books for their course learning. The study used a quasi-experimental, three-group pretest-posttest design with two experimental groups and one control group. The first experimental group used an interactive e-book (an iBook); the second, a non-interactive e-book (a PDF version of the iBook); and the control group, a hardcopy version of the same e-book. Participants were preservice student teachers studying a technology course at the United Arab Emirates University. A post-treatment questionnaire was also administered to all participants. The results did not show any significant difference in achievement of the course content related to the type of the book used. Preservice teachers had a significantly more positive attitude towards the usefulness of the interactive e-book version for content learning than towards other versions and reported more advantages and fewer disadvantages of the interactive version compared to the other versions.

电子书正在取代全球教育机构的教科书。电子书的有效性取决于诸如设计，交互性，内容丰富度以及学生对所获得或认为所获得的收益的感知等因素。这项研究旨在调查电子书对学习技术课程内容的影响，并评估职前生教师对电子书对他们的课程学习有用性的看法。该研究采用了准实验的，三组前测-后测设计，其中有两个实验组和一个对照组。第一个实验小组使用了交互式电子书（iBook）。第二本是非交互式电子书（iBook的PDF版本）；和对照组，是同一本电子书的纸质版本。与会人员是在阿拉伯联合酋长国大学学习技术课程的职前生教师。还对所有参与者进行了治疗后问卷调查。结果与所用书籍的类型有关，在课程内容的实现上没有显着差异。职前教师对交互式电子书版本对内容学习的实用性比对其他版本的态度要积极得多，并且报告说，与其他版本相比，交互式版本的优点和缺点更少。