In school, textbooks are generally provided by the school anyways. With this model parents will have to buy both the iPad and the book. However if they move up to university with this it gets much more appealing, I've had textbooks that cost over 250 dollars by themselves, so if its even close to as cheap as the 15 dollar high school textbooks that would be well worth it.
Some K-12 schools provide students with "banks" or "fleets" of laptops, and a similar setup for iPads could be a way to get these textbooks to students while not forcing their parents to buy an iPad if they didn't want. Either way, there are lots of logistical questions about getting these into students' hands that need to be addressed.
The costs associated with accumulating "banks" of electronic hardware for the use of students will exponentially drive up the per student cost of education. The US is already spending more per student than many other countries...and yet we seem to keep spitting out graduates who ill-prepared to function in the "Real World".
While the idea is appealing (Especially for Apple profits, I'm sure), the reality is that most students will NOT care for the technology hardware and replacement costs needs to be considered. Even having parents co-sign for responsibility of the hardware....just try to get reimbursed for damaged hardware. You'd need to create a Czar of collections just to handle the work load.
I think the concept has merit, but electronic versions of text books is NOT a new concept. Many college text books have been available in PDF format for years.
To compare this to PDF documents is to miss the point entirely.
'At the end of each section, most books have short, multiple-choice pop quizzes that let you test your knowledge from that chapter. Luckily, it's pretty easy to cheat and keep trying until you get the right answer. Naturally, you also have all the usual iBooks options, including highlighting in different colours, making notes and – a real bonus for school texts – dictionary and web searches from any tricky words. Probably the most useful feature is that any notes you make are automatically turned into 'study cards' you can then flick through when it comes to revision. You can also share them over email.'
Good luck doing that with your 'PDF' 'equivalent'....
Also, iPads are cheaper for education and will continue to fall in price, but will continue to be supported.
Simple insurance covers any repair issues.
Oh and even if you have textbooks in PDF format, you still need a device which enables you to read them, which is a cost. (Of course as we've already discussed, this isn't comparable due to the interactivity which you missed)
Yeah, I agree...I could see playing with this for college...in fact if $15 is really the max, this could be HUGELY popular, and almost a killer app for the iPad, but high school? I don't know...
Plus I don't trust the prices to stay low. $150 in 6 months, semi- ;)
"owever if they move up to university with this it gets much more appealing, I've had textbooks that cost over 250 dollars by themselves, so if its even close to as cheap as the 15 dollar high school textbooks that would be well worth it. "
Dont hold your breath. The same entities that are raping you at $250 for the content of the book will still rape you for the content of the downloaded content. Its not the paper, its the content that your paying for.
However, I am sure its easier to crack a digital d/l =)
No doubt they would still be overpriced, but probably not nearly as much. Think about it, with e-books there aren't used copys floating around for years, the per-unit cost might go down but the total sales would be up if this caught on, and since authors can publish directly there are no publishing fees, again saving cost. Even at two, three times the cost of high school books for the university ones, that would be much less than what I pay in a single semester, and the cost of the iPad would easily be made up in three, four semesters.
A single college text can cost the same as an iPad though. Buy four textbooks twice a year for four to five years and one iPad could be significantly cheaper, assuming the digital college books are priced right. This has potential if the content owners see it.
No because you are the product and the publishers are the customer. For the publisher this is great as they get parent's to pony up $15 / book / child whereas schools would reuse the books for several years. This in effect turns the single book sale into say 5 book sales, assuming schools keep a book for 5 years before replacing it (the math only gets better for the publishers as that number gets bigger). So presumably the actual book costs the school less than $75 and this is getting the publishers more money.
College, on the other hand, prices books at $200+ and they are bought by the student, so there is (in theory) no reuse at all. Of course when I was in college the store bought back textbooks and sold them, but there was always far less used copies than students wanting them.
College is also far more likely to try to pirate the books; the student has a strong incentive as he could potentially get several hundred dollars from the parents for books, pirate them, and then pocket the money. I think this reason in an of itself causes the publishers to fight college textbooks from going digital.
As I said in an earlier post, College text books have been available in PDF format for many years. This is not a new concept. Just a re-packaging by Apple. IMO.
Unfortunately digital content has a long history of trying to price a digital license the same as the real thing. I'd hate to see schools have to shell out $500 per tablet and still have to pay the same for the books, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the case.
All the classrooms around here have been getting $10,000 SmartBoards... what's an additional $10,000 per class for some iPads?
A lot of the high school level Algebra and etc. texts that Apple is offering go for something like $100 apiece on Amazon - that's probably a decent watermark to use for comparison.
I think it would make more sense from an economical point of view for this to be done on the kindle platform. Argue all you want for how superior or whatever the iPad is, but any tablet on the market now is capable of adequately viewing books on kindle. If Apple really cared about students they would release an iBook device for a much cheaper price since it can be stripped down a lot. With all of the budget cuts towards schools lately(my high school is being shuttered as I type) and the economy the way it is (and the fact I don't have any kids), I would be angry at so much money being used for this.
With that said, as soon as this is widespread for college level textbooks I'll be all over it. I already have kindle devices and would prefer to use it on them, but if Apple successfully released all of the textbooks for college and at reasonable enough prices, I would splurge on a iPad.
Times change, and methods change. I'm an old guy now, and back when I was taking physics, calculus and other advanced math we had to use sliderules. But, now a Ti-89 is the minimum you need for any of these.
I think it's more than a bit premature to discard an idea on the basis of a product intro and a short article. I know they've spent a whole lot more time on this project than I have just reading this article.
The simple fact is, for any advanced class, you need to reference multiple textbooks across multiple pages. Trying to do this on tablet-size screen real estate with an OS that is as bad at multitasking as iOS is would be pure and simple torture. I would still spend the 250 for a real textbook rather than this half baked shtt.
I think it depends a lot on the class... I have a master's in electrical engineering, and while, yes, occasionally you need 2 or 3 books open, it's more the exception than the rule -- I probably did 90+% of my homework with just the class's main book and a calculator. Heck, I did most of my homework at the student union or the cafeteria or other places where I typically didn't *have* access to my other reference books anyway...
Still, I agree with you that sometimes you absolutely do need more than one book. I see a couple of pretty easy solutions here: Take those more-challenging problems and solve them back at the dorm where you have your PC/Mac with a big monitor (display a couple of books side-by-side... or with a multi-monitor setup, 3 or 4), or just print out the relevant pages from each book *assuming the DRM allows this*. (And unfortunately that's often not a highly publicized detail of a given eBook...)
I happened to visit the New York Public Library a couple months ago (awesome place!), and the big reading room (that you see in many movies, e.g., Ghostbusters) was full of people who almost all had laptops. I also saw a few who had more than one -- including the setup where they were writing a paper or taking notes on their laptop while using an iPad as an electronic book. That's still an expensive setup -- particularly if you do go the all-Apple route -- but these days it's pretty cheap compared to the overall cost of college.
There is a problem though, iBook isn't available on your Mac or Win PC. It's a bit too appliance like, inflexible and unmovable in this case. It's no coherency. Appliances yes they should be, but not the content itself. And if you got the textbooks in PDFs/ePub you can use everywhere you wouldn't need a iPad to read them, a cheap Android tablet or a Nook Tablet or Kindle Fire would probably do then. iPad would be fine too in that case though.
It's not that tablets and notebooks are expensive a Macbook Air 11 plus iPad 2 wifi 16GB is only $999 plus $499. A cheaper route of the same thing would be a $200 tablet and a $600-700 dollar computer. Considering the school fees the councils pony up here in Sweden (for lower education up to secondary school) and other costs that's really nothing for the school. If you think about corporations most of your desk cost is software hardware is just a small fracture. Schools that neglect the software portion can get away with giving high-school / secondary level students computers especially private ones. Adding a e-reader, or tablet as just one other thing that is not used for pedagogy won't really bleed them dry, every other classroom already has 3000 dollar smartboards that is not in use (or at least not more useful then a 500 dollar projector). It's the infrastructure to use them that would be expensive and halting or faltering. For college, university students it's all pretty much their responsibility, the professor can get away with having written all the material (compendium) for the class himself that is already distributed electronically on some classes some of the books are available as ebook or warez, they acquire the textbooks directly from the publishers, and so on. The more that is moved over electronically it should all be good and get better, moving back to stationary terminals isn't really an option, but for those it doesn't make sense to have iBook/iTunes as a channel if it is exclusively so. It takes a lot not to replicate and end up with the same results as those Educational CDROM's and previous none widely used electronic media. Those low-res screens probably aren't suited for maths and physics also. You can forget about printing out anything. You can forget to save on book costs.
"or math homework with a digital textbook is fail.
It can take as many as 3 or 4 books open concurrently and frequently referenced to accomplish the task.
Tablets and laptops aren't practical for this. "
This is SO TRUE. I have tried before, it is just annoying. You can't flip through a PDF quickly either whither it is on iPad or viewing it on a laptop. Reference text books will be around.
So Apple will not become a book editor/publisher......Get 30% (or more) off the top for selling the books through Itunes, then get 600+ from sale of iproducts and needed accessories.
This smells solely of a self-serving venture. Yes....it.....does.
Now if this was an open concept that was Open Source...it would allow for greater consideration.....but its not.
It appears that Apple does not want to stray from its perceived ideal price of an ibook, 14.99$; the same price for which it is under investigation for colluding with the publishers, aka pricefixing.
I don't know how it is today but all of our books were 5-10yrs old in HS. Physics, Chem, Earth Science, Precalc, Shakespeare, and College Prep don't change that often. Demanding people buy an overpriced toy that needs to be replaced every 2-3years will not fly with taxpayers. The school system purchasing the digital book rights and demanding the student families purchase a specific overpriced toy to run the books will not fly with parents. Some people actually want to keep their books a few extra years for review.
I wouldn't be so sure -- people are already accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars for college, and it'd be a VERY rare college student today who doesn't have a laptop (which not that many years ago many people would have called "toys" as well). Adding a tablet to that mix is already not uncommon, and overall isn't going to be seen as that big of a deal IMO -- especially if tablet prices fall or if Apple is smart enough to release their reader for Android.
Apple's going to offer some solution to the "how do you pay for the iPads?" problem, likely one that lets the student/family own the iPad. Maybe it's a low-end education-only iPad (ePad!). Maybe it's deals with school districts (get all your kids using iPads and Apple will discount or throw in some free pads for students in lower-income families or something). Maybe it's a boring old education discount, but deeper. Maybe they foresee a $200 Apple tablet in X years and they're laying the groundwork early to get those in schools.
In other words, I think the textbook deal is part of a bigger push to get iPads in classrooms. I don't think they'd start in on this without a long-term plan that could succeed, and this deal alone isn't it.
This is a good application for eBooks and the iPad. But at the end of the day, you really can't learn any more from using an eBook than from a standard textbook. Just throwing money at computers for kids isn't going to make them smarter or better educated. Unless it's cost-effective, It 'll just increase the cost of education
While I do think the textbook aspect is nifty (though I will never use it), the writer's app has some slightly disturbing properties. For example, read the following portion from the EULA on the app:
"If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple."
Basically, if you use the app, they own the work. This quote aptly sums it up:
"It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented."
Apple is the biggest drug dealer in the world regarding education. They practically give away technology and then when the need arises to update or add apps charge an arm and a leg. There is no such thing as a 15 dollar text book digital or otherwise. What is in it for Person and the others to slash their prices by over 150% so that Apple can push Ipads?
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
39 Comments
Back to Article
tipoo - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
In school, textbooks are generally provided by the school anyways. With this model parents will have to buy both the iPad and the book. However if they move up to university with this it gets much more appealing, I've had textbooks that cost over 250 dollars by themselves, so if its even close to as cheap as the 15 dollar high school textbooks that would be well worth it.Andrew.a.cunningham - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Some K-12 schools provide students with "banks" or "fleets" of laptops, and a similar setup for iPads could be a way to get these textbooks to students while not forcing their parents to buy an iPad if they didn't want. Either way, there are lots of logistical questions about getting these into students' hands that need to be addressed.GotThumbs - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
The costs associated with accumulating "banks" of electronic hardware for the use of students will exponentially drive up the per student cost of education. The US is already spending more per student than many other countries...and yet we seem to keep spitting out graduates who ill-prepared to function in the "Real World".While the idea is appealing (Especially for Apple profits, I'm sure), the reality is that most students will NOT care for the technology hardware and replacement costs needs to be considered. Even having parents co-sign for responsibility of the hardware....just try to get reimbursed for damaged hardware. You'd need to create a Czar of collections just to handle the work load.
I think the concept has merit, but electronic versions of text books is NOT a new concept. Many college text books have been available in PDF format for years.
doobydoo - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
To compare this to PDF documents is to miss the point entirely.'At the end of each section, most books have short, multiple-choice pop quizzes that let you test your knowledge from that chapter. Luckily, it's pretty easy to cheat and keep trying until you get the right answer. Naturally, you also have all the usual iBooks options, including highlighting in different colours, making notes and – a real bonus for school texts – dictionary and web searches from any tricky words. Probably the most useful feature is that any notes you make are automatically turned into 'study cards' you can then flick through when it comes to revision. You can also share them over email.'
Good luck doing that with your 'PDF' 'equivalent'....
/sigh (some people, huh)
doobydoo - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
Oh and a 'bank' of hardware is only one option.They also work out cheaper for the students.
Also, iPads are cheaper for education and will continue to fall in price, but will continue to be supported.
Simple insurance covers any repair issues.
Oh and even if you have textbooks in PDF format, you still need a device which enables you to read them, which is a cost. (Of course as we've already discussed, this isn't comparable due to the interactivity which you missed)
Wolfpup - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Yeah, I agree...I could see playing with this for college...in fact if $15 is really the max, this could be HUGELY popular, and almost a killer app for the iPad, but high school? I don't know...Plus I don't trust the prices to stay low. $150 in 6 months, semi- ;)
retrospooty - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
"owever if they move up to university with this it gets much more appealing, I've had textbooks that cost over 250 dollars by themselves, so if its even close to as cheap as the 15 dollar high school textbooks that would be well worth it. "Dont hold your breath. The same entities that are raping you at $250 for the content of the book will still rape you for the content of the downloaded content. Its not the paper, its the content that your paying for.
However, I am sure its easier to crack a digital d/l =)
tipoo - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
No doubt they would still be overpriced, but probably not nearly as much. Think about it, with e-books there aren't used copys floating around for years, the per-unit cost might go down but the total sales would be up if this caught on, and since authors can publish directly there are no publishing fees, again saving cost. Even at two, three times the cost of high school books for the university ones, that would be much less than what I pay in a single semester, and the cost of the iPad would easily be made up in three, four semesters.Red Storm - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Wouldn't this make a whole lot more sense for college level students?NickB. - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
College kids can't afford iPads *and* Macbooks... and most of them already have MacBooks.Something like this requires rich benefactors (be it parents or government).
Mr Perfect - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
A single college text can cost the same as an iPad though. Buy four textbooks twice a year for four to five years and one iPad could be significantly cheaper, assuming the digital college books are priced right. This has potential if the content owners see it.rangda - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
No because you are the product and the publishers are the customer. For the publisher this is great as they get parent's to pony up $15 / book / child whereas schools would reuse the books for several years. This in effect turns the single book sale into say 5 book sales, assuming schools keep a book for 5 years before replacing it (the math only gets better for the publishers as that number gets bigger). So presumably the actual book costs the school less than $75 and this is getting the publishers more money.College, on the other hand, prices books at $200+ and they are bought by the student, so there is (in theory) no reuse at all. Of course when I was in college the store bought back textbooks and sold them, but there was always far less used copies than students wanting them.
College is also far more likely to try to pirate the books; the student has a strong incentive as he could potentially get several hundred dollars from the parents for books, pirate them, and then pocket the money. I think this reason in an of itself causes the publishers to fight college textbooks from going digital.
GotThumbs - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
As I said in an earlier post, College text books have been available in PDF format for many years. This is not a new concept. Just a re-packaging by Apple. IMO.doobydoo - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
As I corrected your earlier post, to mistake a PDF for an interactive textbook with all the features on offer here is your failing, not Apples.NickB. - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Unfortunately digital content has a long history of trying to price a digital license the same as the real thing. I'd hate to see schools have to shell out $500 per tablet and still have to pay the same for the books, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the case.All the classrooms around here have been getting $10,000 SmartBoards... what's an additional $10,000 per class for some iPads?
extremepcs - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
$10k for a smartboard? They got robbed. We put the model that includes a projector and also the response systems for about $3k.Andrew.a.cunningham - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
A lot of the high school level Algebra and etc. texts that Apple is offering go for something like $100 apiece on Amazon - that's probably a decent watermark to use for comparison.V-Money - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
I think it would make more sense from an economical point of view for this to be done on the kindle platform. Argue all you want for how superior or whatever the iPad is, but any tablet on the market now is capable of adequately viewing books on kindle. If Apple really cared about students they would release an iBook device for a much cheaper price since it can be stripped down a lot. With all of the budget cuts towards schools lately(my high school is being shuttered as I type) and the economy the way it is (and the fact I don't have any kids), I would be angry at so much money being used for this.With that said, as soon as this is widespread for college level textbooks I'll be all over it. I already have kindle devices and would prefer to use it on them, but if Apple successfully released all of the textbooks for college and at reasonable enough prices, I would splurge on a iPad.
doobydoo - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
iPads are cheaper for education too, and will no doubt reduce in price once the iPad 3 is out.prophet001 - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
or math homework with a digital textbook is fail.It can take as many as 3 or 4 books open concurrently and frequently referenced to accomplish the task.
Tablets and laptops aren't practical for this.
Scannall - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
Times change, and methods change. I'm an old guy now, and back when I was taking physics, calculus and other advanced math we had to use sliderules. But, now a Ti-89 is the minimum you need for any of these.I think it's more than a bit premature to discard an idea on the basis of a product intro and a short article. I know they've spent a whole lot more time on this project than I have just reading this article.
jesh462 - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
The simple fact is, for any advanced class, you need to reference multiple textbooks across multiple pages. Trying to do this on tablet-size screen real estate with an OS that is as bad at multitasking as iOS is would be pure and simple torture. I would still spend the 250 for a real textbook rather than this half baked shtt.JKolstad - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
I think it depends a lot on the class... I have a master's in electrical engineering, and while, yes, occasionally you need 2 or 3 books open, it's more the exception than the rule -- I probably did 90+% of my homework with just the class's main book and a calculator. Heck, I did most of my homework at the student union or the cafeteria or other places where I typically didn't *have* access to my other reference books anyway...Still, I agree with you that sometimes you absolutely do need more than one book. I see a couple of pretty easy solutions here: Take those more-challenging problems and solve them back at the dorm where you have your PC/Mac with a big monitor (display a couple of books side-by-side... or with a multi-monitor setup, 3 or 4), or just print out the relevant pages from each book *assuming the DRM allows this*. (And unfortunately that's often not a highly publicized detail of a given eBook...)
I happened to visit the New York Public Library a couple months ago (awesome place!), and the big reading room (that you see in many movies, e.g., Ghostbusters) was full of people who almost all had laptops. I also saw a few who had more than one -- including the setup where they were writing a paper or taking notes on their laptop while using an iPad as an electronic book. That's still an expensive setup -- particularly if you do go the all-Apple route -- but these days it's pretty cheap compared to the overall cost of college.
Penti - Saturday, January 21, 2012 - link
There is a problem though, iBook isn't available on your Mac or Win PC. It's a bit too appliance like, inflexible and unmovable in this case. It's no coherency. Appliances yes they should be, but not the content itself. And if you got the textbooks in PDFs/ePub you can use everywhere you wouldn't need a iPad to read them, a cheap Android tablet or a Nook Tablet or Kindle Fire would probably do then. iPad would be fine too in that case though.It's not that tablets and notebooks are expensive a Macbook Air 11 plus iPad 2 wifi 16GB is only $999 plus $499. A cheaper route of the same thing would be a $200 tablet and a $600-700 dollar computer. Considering the school fees the councils pony up here in Sweden (for lower education up to secondary school) and other costs that's really nothing for the school. If you think about corporations most of your desk cost is software hardware is just a small fracture. Schools that neglect the software portion can get away with giving high-school / secondary level students computers especially private ones. Adding a e-reader, or tablet as just one other thing that is not used for pedagogy won't really bleed them dry, every other classroom already has 3000 dollar smartboards that is not in use (or at least not more useful then a 500 dollar projector). It's the infrastructure to use them that would be expensive and halting or faltering. For college, university students it's all pretty much their responsibility, the professor can get away with having written all the material (compendium) for the class himself that is already distributed electronically on some classes some of the books are available as ebook or warez, they acquire the textbooks directly from the publishers, and so on. The more that is moved over electronically it should all be good and get better, moving back to stationary terminals isn't really an option, but for those it doesn't make sense to have iBook/iTunes as a channel if it is exclusively so. It takes a lot not to replicate and end up with the same results as those Educational CDROM's and previous none widely used electronic media. Those low-res screens probably aren't suited for maths and physics also. You can forget about printing out anything. You can forget to save on book costs.
jesh462 - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
I agree. Real school work is just stupid to try to get done on a tablet - especially an iOS based one.cptcolo - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
"or math homework with a digital textbook is fail.It can take as many as 3 or 4 books open concurrently and frequently referenced to accomplish the task.
Tablets and laptops aren't practical for this. "
This is SO TRUE. I have tried before, it is just annoying. You can't flip through a PDF quickly either whither it is on iPad or viewing it on a laptop. Reference text books will be around.
GotThumbs - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
So Apple will not become a book editor/publisher......Get 30% (or more) off the top for selling the books through Itunes, then get 600+ from sale of iproducts and needed accessories.This smells solely of a self-serving venture. Yes....it.....does.
Now if this was an open concept that was Open Source...it would allow for greater consideration.....but its not.
No thanks Apple.
KoolAidMan1 - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
A business trying to make a profit, how shockingMetaluna - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
No, what's shocking is witnessing a monopoly/cartel in the making, and people are cheering it on like they just cured AIDS.doobydoo - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
Just because this is innovative, a world first, and a great way for students to save money, doesn't make it a monopoly.ananduser - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
It appears that Apple does not want to stray from its perceived ideal price of an ibook, 14.99$; the same price for which it is under investigation for colluding with the publishers, aka pricefixing.rfbrang - Thursday, January 19, 2012 - link
I don't know how it is today but all of our books were 5-10yrs old in HS. Physics, Chem, Earth Science, Precalc, Shakespeare, and College Prep don't change that often. Demanding people buy an overpriced toy that needs to be replaced every 2-3years will not fly with taxpayers. The school system purchasing the digital book rights and demanding the student families purchase a specific overpriced toy to run the books will not fly with parents. Some people actually want to keep their books a few extra years for review.JKolstad - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
I wouldn't be so sure -- people are already accustomed to spending tens of thousands of dollars for college, and it'd be a VERY rare college student today who doesn't have a laptop (which not that many years ago many people would have called "toys" as well). Adding a tablet to that mix is already not uncommon, and overall isn't going to be seen as that big of a deal IMO -- especially if tablet prices fall or if Apple is smart enough to release their reader for Android.twotwotwo - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
Apple's going to offer some solution to the "how do you pay for the iPads?" problem, likely one that lets the student/family own the iPad. Maybe it's a low-end education-only iPad (ePad!). Maybe it's deals with school districts (get all your kids using iPads and Apple will discount or throw in some free pads for students in lower-income families or something). Maybe it's a boring old education discount, but deeper. Maybe they foresee a $200 Apple tablet in X years and they're laying the groundwork early to get those in schools.In other words, I think the textbook deal is part of a bigger push to get iPads in classrooms. I don't think they'd start in on this without a long-term plan that could succeed, and this deal alone isn't it.
Hector2 - Friday, January 20, 2012 - link
This is a good application for eBooks and the iPad. But at the end of the day, you really can't learn any more from using an eBook than from a standard textbook. Just throwing money at computers for kids isn't going to make them smarter or better educated. Unless it's cost-effective, It 'll just increase the cost of educationIceClaec - Saturday, January 21, 2012 - link
While I do think the textbook aspect is nifty (though I will never use it), the writer's app has some slightly disturbing properties. For example, read the following portion from the EULA on the app:"If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple."
Basically, if you use the app, they own the work. This quote aptly sums it up:
"It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented."
You can read more about it here: http://www.cultofmac.com/141476/you-must-sell-your...
vincent8687 - Sunday, January 22, 2012 - link
，，，打酱油的EssV - Monday, January 23, 2012 - link
Is this from Apple or kno(kno.com) on IPADs? Kno had this for quite sometime.Curlysrevenge - Wednesday, September 25, 2013 - link
Apple is the biggest drug dealer in the world regarding education. They practically give away technology and then when the need arises to update or add apps charge an arm and a leg. There is no such thing as a 15 dollar text book digital or otherwise. What is in it for Person and the others to slash their prices by over 150% so that Apple can push Ipads?