"MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices."<p>It's a nice dream, but it probably won't be what will happen. Not at first, anyways. Text-book publishers will continue to charge what they think the market will bear. They will completely ignore the fact that the cost of text-books is often spread over several students and several years via the used book market. With no used print editions available and perfect reproductions of texts available for "free", students will turn to piracy in droves. Then the publishers will blame the platform for encouraging piracy. This might not happen if publishers recognize that digital editions, if priced cheaply enough, might still bring in the same amount of revenue since every student is now forced to buy a new version of the text. I'm not hopeful that this will happen though.<p>Many subjects have text-books whose position in the universal cannon is unchallenged. They're so good, so well respected, or the competition so poor that practically everyone uses them to teach. Other subjects have no real cannon text-books because no single text has managed to distinguish itself. Other subjects are simply obscure or esoteric enough that professors tend to take a DIY approach to the course text, with wildly varying results. In any subject without an established canon text, a suite of digital text-book creation tools could be a great boon to writers. DIY texts that prove good enough to have broad appeal will face greatly reduced barriers to wider use. Of course, when you can deliver text-books to profs for the price of an email's bandwidth, it's going to become very hard to choose good course texts! Content creation tools are a great thing, but I hope somebody out there is working on content filtering tools for text-books too!
I been thinking about technical publishing recently, and I don't think the rumoured tools from Apple go far enough. Let's start by assuming that publishing houses are essentially dead. Printing is on the way out, and distribution is handled by other online retailers (Amazon, Apple, etc.) Most technical books don't really need editors. Layout could still be an issue, I don't really think it will be -- read-on for why.<p>My argument:<p>- e-book readers are a dead-end. Tablets are going to replace them. The only thing e-book readers have going for them is e-ink. Tablet screens are going to be awesome. The 10" Transformer Prime is going to be HD soon. Rumours are the iPad 3 is going to be 2048x1024. They'll be good enough.<p>- e-book formats are essentially stripped down HTML, designed for the low-powered CPUs found in e-book readers. Tablets web browsers will be on par with PC browsers soon.<p>This means there will be no boundaries to formatting content as HTML and reading it on a tablet. We already have many tools for creating collections of HTML documents. They're often called blog engines. Non-technical will do just fine using blogging tools, just like they currently do. More technical people will use pandoc/asciidoc/whatever, just like they currently do.<p>Then you have to ask:<p>- Why release a book as a monolith? Releasing a chapter at a time greatly lowers the author's risk. They can start generating revenue straight away, and find out what the market is really interested in.<p>And then you have ask:<p>- Why even write a book? Why not just produce material, using whatever media is appropriate, and create a community (and revenue stream) around this, rather than working towards a some arbitrarily sized collection of words?<p>So that's where I think technical publishing is going. Smaller units of work, shorter cycle time, and more responsive to the market place. And not really a world that needs books, and book creation tools, per se.
I'm glad I went to college when paper books were still prevalent. Some material was Web-based and that was always the hardest to read and comprehend. I just can't stare at an illuminated screen for that long (e-ink does help with this) and I find I engage with the material much more when I can rapidly flip to it.<p>That latter point is an odd one for me, but I "know" a book by its thickness. I recall where stuff is by roughly how far into the book it was. No e-reader has been able to replicate that.<p>iPads also have that whole reflective surface thing that annoys me. But presumably Apple could offer something else in the future that would work better for people like me.
Apple is using the iPad as a platform to leap into publishing, eager to also collect the 30% Apple tax in this industry. Smart move, but it will be a sad day when schools/pupils will have to pay 30% of the price to the device manufacturer just to get an education.
Thats great news. This industry needs disruption. Why do we need textbooks that costs more than 80 dollars, even in the digital version. And worse, Why do we need a new edition every couple years?<p>And for me, as a foreigner student, it's even harder. The cost of the textbooks gets more expensive with the translation costs.
I am about a month away from launching a site that will easily produce error free e-pubs all the time, every time and have an editor. <a href="http://www.pixelpublish.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.pixelpublish.com</a> if you would like to be informed of beta and the launch.<p>I though the same. Textbooks are a no brainer. But aside from user issues that many have accounted here, there is also an issue of professor/textbook publisher relationship.
Textbooks authors (aka the professors) have extensive and long lasting contracts with the publishers of textbooks. They did not start doing this yesterday and 'an app' type of approach will hardly hurt them. They promise distributions to bookstores, printing, lectoring by people who know what they are talking about, typesetting (which isn't a small feat given graphs and figures in textbooks) and other services.<p>Apple is flailing. They want to get into the e-book market, but they do not know how. E-bookstore is already a flop and they are not about to issue an app that will feed Amazon's pockets. That is why I think they are initially focusing on textbooks, but I am not sure that it will work.
Interesting move. I see this as more than an attempt to disrupt publishing - it's about pushing a new tablet-centric model of education and pushing Microsoft to the margins. Apple have already been making a hard sell for iPads in schools - <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-educators-with-trips-to-silicon-valley.html?pagewanted=all" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-educ...</a>.<p>And anyone can see why - getting into schools is probably the easiest way to make the iPad practically omnipresent. Especially if they have a lot of key content (textbooks and apps), education strikes me as an area where one platform could build an almost intractable lead.
Textbooks should be a lot cheaper considering that most of the information in them is freely available. Authors should be paid fairly for collecting and making sense of the information, but it's ridiculous how much they cost.<p>And this shouldn't be an issue: <a href="http://imgur.com/FchrB" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/FchrB</a>
Nothing Apple does will ever surprise me.<p>Managing to profile the world's single most profitable Top-5 tech company as a 'Peoples movement' is nothing short of genius!<p>I for one welcome the iDontneedtothinkformyself. (Wild guess that there is a patent pending)<p>:)