The Future Comes to Education
It’s difficult to overstate the importance of what Apple announced this morning in New York:
Digital textbooks available for iBooks 2 on iPad will come at a significant discount over regular paper-based books, with prices at $14.99 or less from major publishers like McGraw Hill and Pearson.
Titles announced at Thursday’s media event from Pearson include Algebra I, Biology, Environmental Science, Geometry. These titles are used by more than 4 million high school students.
McGraw Hill is also on board, Apple’s Phil Schiller revealed. They are offering Algebra I, Biology, Chemistry, Geometry and Physics titles as of today on the iBookstore with iBooks 2.
$14.99 or less for textbooks, with major publishers already on board. And these are improved, multimedia textbooks, not mere PDFs of existing books.
UPDATE: Video of these things in action here, and it’s impressive.
Oh, here’s where the ‘law of unintended consequences’ comes into play.
Remember the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990? Several universities have already tried to use Kindle’s for textbooks, only to be sued by students under the ADA. Since Kindle’s don’t have an option for blind students( and neither do Ipads).
So, for the moment we are stuck with an pre-industrial age solution to modern education.
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple is providing a framework for plugins. I could see that being an interesting niche market to get into.
Yay, the university will require me to buy textbooks locked to Apple’s proprietary hardware and software. Yippee.
I know it will be difficult, having to read your insanely inexpensive textbooks on an iPad your school will provide you with for free, but I trust you shall persevere.
I don’t know about insanely inexpensive. My daughter just had to buy an “online” textbook for her biology class as CSU, written by her professor, natch. $124.00.
Apple iBooks textbooks cannot, by the EULA, cost more than $14.99. And they were just introduced today. So I don’t know what your daughter was required to purchase, but it had zero to do with this post.
Stephen, I seriously doubt that major college texts will be offered for free, but I agree that this is a major step forward.
It’s an open secret that textbook authors make frequent revisions so that schools are forced to buy the latest edition, creating more revenue for the author & publisher. I don’t know how many times at Miami U. I tried to sell back a text I had purchased as brand-new at the start of semester, only to be told that it was already out of date. Feh.
I’m assuming most universities follow a similar policy: the college bookstore(s) will -at the end of semester- buy back used texts depending on the wear & tear, if it’s still in use, etc. A “purchased as new” text sold back to the store in good condition could get me 30%-50% of the cover price.
I’ve been saying for a while the iPad would make an excellent textbook repository, especially after reading of Neptunus Lex’s remarks on the iPad’s utility for pilots, with respect to maps. Very nice, according to him.
Surprised that colleges would go for that the publishers would go with a $14.99 max price, but (now that I think about it) this might generate more revenue for the publishers, since I doubt colleges would buy-back an electronic text… All new copies, every semester. Hmmm….
If it means paying $75 for my textbooks instead of over $700 then by all means, lock me in.
As soon as someone digitizes the textbooks, unlicensed .mobi files will be out on the Internet in no time. It will be interesting to see what platform will students prefer for those
Max, one possible response: say a given university offers a course on Probability & Statistics, and that 87 students enroll in that course for a given semester. Since I expect some sort of nod to IP, it would be not-unreasonable to require the university to show that 87 digital copies were purchased. Anyone not possessing a receipt from the local bookstore may be presumed to have committed digital piracy. Consequences would then follow.
With a max price of $14.99, this is not an onerous requirement.
I have no problem at all with requiring payment for texts; after all, someone has to perform research, collating, typing, editing, etc. As with any other skill, not everyone is qualified to write textbooks. What I do object to is the up-until-now bad habit of issuing frequent updates to editions, forcing colleges to buy new versions.
McGraw Hill had an e-book feature for a while called connect, strangely they made it flash based and that froze them out of the iOS market. It’s hard to take the content industry seriously about anything these days.
What might this do to texts at the high school and elementary school level? For years we’ve heard about how the ‘religious kooks’ in Texas have inordinate power since printing books is so expensive that the country is forced to live with whatever the snake handlers in the Texas school board wants.
I see a red/blue education dichotomy in the near future with states full of progressively educated youth trying desperately to woo businesses that are fleeing to states that provide a practical education to their kids.