iBooks Author hands-on: making textbooks in the 21st century

A) They want to draw people into their ecosystem, they are a business after all

B) If they tried to include Win8 tablets and Android tablets the fragmentation would be horrific, the books would not look or perform the same on all the different devices.

I think this is a case of making the perfect the enemy of the good. Better question: what is stopping Amazon, Google, or Microsoft from revolutionizing the crufty old textbook business? Answer: nothing at all, yet they haven’t. I don’t see any reason to throw tomatoes at the one player who has bothered to do something. In Apple’s favor is that they have persisted on several fronts to radically advance several industries. They are generally aware of and ok with the fact that, if successful, they will have several competitors.

In other words, if you want to develop eTextbooks on Windows, just wait. If Apple’s efforts bear fruit, Microsoft will certainly give you a tool for it down the road. Apple is certainly entitled to first mover’s advantage for being willing to take the risk and make the investment.

because that will create poor user experience which is against their philosophy..
Apple tends to control every aspect of the product. I dont see why they would change that know.. also by giving away the software for free they need something in return. in this case its value added to the ecosystem when you publish content to their store. i think its pretty smart. and it wont detract from their interests in moving forward education. they need to draw a line somewhere.

They are a hardware company.

They are selling physical products.

If someone is writing a textbook, they can likely buy a Macintosh, if they don’t already have one.

this will bi quite a big book won’t fit any iPad version yet…. So sorry you’ll have to wait quite a while for this to work ;-)

This product claims to be specifically targetted to k-12 education. however, aren’t most k-12 school in the US public and don’t most of those schools supply books to students free of charge already (yes I know the costs for the books are hidden in local taxes). I have to wonder what parents will think about shelling out money for an Ipad and then for buying books on their own.

Free to students, not to the schools. What happens in schools that are underfunded is that they limit how often they will update their textbooks because they’re so expensive to purchase, especially for the volume of students they have to support. Anyway, you’re wondering how parents would feel about buying iPads, but I wonder why you think parents would have to buy iPads? The most obvious route here would be for school, at some point, to stop buying physical textbooks and to lease the iPads to students, modified and locked down so that they can insure them.

Also, you can already make textbooks on ePub. The problem with ePub is that it doesn’t do this well, which is why it hasn’t taken off.

ePub has proven to be a pretty horrible and unimaginative format. Non-profit textbook efforts certainly could have happened before now but haven’t seemed to thrive. Presumably if you go through something as arduous as writing a textbook, you’d like to be paid for your work.

If Apple’s eTexts are really as good as they seem to claim, wealthier school districts will use them (probably on school-provided iPads), and their students will perform better. Poorer districts will continue with paper books. But if the advantage is persistent and significant, eTexts will eventually spread to most systems if taxpayers choose to have competitive schools in their districts. Perhaps unfair but this is mostly the way of education in the US. Cash-starved systems can almost never afford to take a chance on unproven innovation.

How*

We need to be able to edit comments (and comment reply notifications)

A book can never replace experience.

Man i think you are on to something here, follow that lead an report back ,-)

I don’t know, I guess the same way you can tell if a textbook is reputable now. You look at the publisher, see if the book has been used or is currently being used at reputable universities/schools, talk to someone (like your/a professor who actually knows the subject), etc.

Thousands of books purporting to contain factual information are published every year. Not all of them are correct and yet somehow the world hasn’t yet imploded.