Apple's digital textbook initiative

[Fredjikrang]

So, what do you all think? I think it sounds great! I mean, I would much rather pay $15 for a text book than $200. Sure, those are only High School textbooks, but still, hopefully higher level books are not slow in making an appearance.

[Katya]

Why would the textbook cost $15 instead of $200?

[Fredjikrang]

1. No need to print. That has long been a major argument for the high price of textbooks, the high cost of "short run" printings.

2. Fewer middle men in distribution.

3. No need to ship large, heavy, text books.

4. You can't use the same text book for 10 years. (A practice especially common in K-12 schools.) Every student would have to buy their own. That means higher quantity, so you can take a lower % of each one as profit, and still make more money.

But those are just a few of the economic arguments.

The gist of it is, in their announcement, Apple said that the majority of the text books would be priced at $15 or less. The above are some probable ways that they can do it, and still have everyone make more money. Well, except for the printing companies.

[Fredjikrang]

Oh! I forgot to mention, increased competition! Since Apple has released a free app to make text books, there will be more competition in the market, further driving prices down.

[Imogen]

When does this start?

[Dragon Lady]

Also, people can't resell them. Who would pay $200 for a textbook that you know you can't resell when the class is over? (Assuming it's not a for a major class and a book that will help you in your field forever.) So it makes more sense to price them much, much lower.

[Fredjikrang]

Imogen: It is already up. But, you need an iPad to really use them. Although if you have a Mac you can design your own books using their free book creator Mac application.

Dragon Lady: Yup. Even though that is still a whole lot cheaper than I paid to rent my text books for 125 days.

[Laser Jock]

Well, $15 textbooks sounds great for college, but they're starting with grade school textbooks first, and there, I'm not so sure this is cheaper than existing textbooks. For one thing, it's normal to buy a textbook and then spread the cost out by having students use the same book for years (at my schools, I think it was usually ~7 years). This isn't possible with iBooks: the books are tied to the user's iTunes account and can't be transferred.

Plus there's the cost of providing iPads for everyone (and replacing them as they break/become obsolete/are stolen), which is huge. I also had to laugh that Apple claimed iBooks were better than normal textbooks because they were "durable" while normal textbooks aren't: the reverse is obviously true. I can do all kinds of things to a normal textbook that would destroy an iPad.

I'm also curious to see how the rather restrictive licensing terms play out. You can only sell the iBooks through Apple, and they can arbitrarily refuse to sell them for any reason -- much like the app store. I don't think this means that the text of the book can't be published somewhere else too (in a different electronic format), but that's not totally clear. This restriction only applies if you want to make money off your book, though: if you're giving it away, you can distribute it however you please. Apple only cares if you're trying to make money off of it, in which case they demand a cut.

[Fredjikrang]

Yeah, those are two things that I noticed as well. I definitely raised my eyebrow when I heard about the restrictive licensing, but I wonder if the bigger companies get some different terms. There is already some evidence of this, in that they don't have the 2GB size limit on their books.

Also, as far as cost, I can testify that schools can get some really sweet discounts from Apple when they buy large quantities of merchandise, so the cost of iPads really isn't as high for them as it would seem. They also tend to be somewhat forgiving on warranty replacements, helping to lower replacement costs. But, it is something that the schools are going to have to look at carefully, to decide what the real cost is going to be over time, and if it really brings and improved learning experience or not.

And I really think that it would make more sense for college students, since we pretty much always have to buy our own books, and so it would make buying an iPad completely justifiable. Even if you paid an average of $30 a text book, you could save money in as little as one semester! Including the normal cost of an iPad.

One other thing, about schools saving money by using the same text book for long periods of time. True, but this has its own problems. For instance, my middle school history book said that "the Berlin wall will never come down." This was several years after it had come down. I believe that my little sister even used this same book two years later. So, yes, you have to buy a "new" book every year, but hopefully it will be more up to date. (Though admittedly this doesn't matter as much in some subjects, but at least errors can be corrected, without requiring another large textbook purchase.)

[Fredjikrang]

Of course, if you get a few more studies like this one you are going to get a lot of parents and law makers demanding that it is used in schools.

[Portia]

I'm no Luddite, but the idea of a digital textbook is just craziness to me. How will you conveniently flip back and forth to reference the Double Angle Identities? What about color diagrams of the Krebs Cycle? The scoliosis that is the mark of all true scholars? I've used e-novels for class, but that's as far as I'll take it. In the past year of so I've really gravitated back to dead tree works.

[Portia]

Also, at the U of U library today, I was really quite surprised that they didn't have back copies of Scientific American. Yes, I can use the Google, but there are many reasons that I may want to peruse a hard copy: my memory may be triggered by the cover, I might need to look at the article in its original layout, I might remember the phsyical layout more than a search term.

[Dragon Lady]

Yes, but can your paper books include a video showing actual DNA?

[Katya]

Also, at the U of U library today, I was really quite surprised that they didn't have back copies of Scientific American. Yes, I can use the Google, but there are many reasons that I may want to peruse a hard copy: my memory may be triggered by the cover, I might need to look at the article in its original layout, I might remember the phsyical layout more than a search term.

Some journal databases don't include pictures or don't include every article in the journal, which can significantly change the reading experience.

[Katya]

Yes, but can your paper books include a video showing actual DNA?

Will the format of your digital book be supported in 10 years? Can you lend your digital book to a friend? Is the resolution of your digital device as high as the resolution of the images in a printed book?

[Laser Jock]

Katya raises some excellent questions (as usual ). There are also other issues, like the possibility of censorship/suppression after the fact (some ebook marketplaces can delete the book from your device after you've already downloaded it), the poor typesetting (most ebook formats simply don't let you make text look good), the fact that ebooks require an expensive, fragile, battery-limited device, and so on.

[Laser Jock]

Going back to Apple specifically, another big limitation is that at least for now, iBooks Author (the only program you can use to publish to Apple's book store) has no support for mathematical equations more complicated than 2+2. This rules right out any textbooks in math or the mathematical/physical sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.), certainly at the high school level, and obviously the college level. I'm sure they'll get around to fixing this deficiency eventually, but for now their format is unusable for these subjects. (The cynic in me points out that they obviously prioritized "Ooh, shiny!" features over actual textbook features.)

[Fredjikrang]

Format supported in 10 years?: Probably. Formats such as this are usually supported for long periods of time. For example: PDF, .doc, etc. And even if it isn't, the content will be available in another format in the future. Are digital formats as long lived as physical ones? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how they are kept.

Can you lend it to a friend?: Yes, with your device. But really, it is a text book. I frequently lend novels and such to my friends, but I have yet to lend a text book, and it is very unlikely that I would do it for any long period of time. In fact, I only have text books because no one would buy them from me and I was stuck with a $150 paperweight that I will probably never use.

Is the resolution of your digital device as high as the resolution of a printed book: Probably higher. And that is before even accounting for the ability to have super high resolution images in a digital text book, allowing you to change the level of magnification at whim.

Also, it seems like people can't get around the idea that this is not really a book any more. It is presented in a familiar book like format, but has practically none of the inbuilt restrictions of an actual book. For instance, why in the world would I want to "conveniently flip back and forth to reference the Double Angle Identities" when I can just make a compendium of them and have them visible at will. Why would I need "color diagrams of the Krebs Cycle" when I can not only have them, but also pausable, replayable animations? With audio, built in flash cards, practice quizzes, games, examples, etc. to help me learn it? (Yes, I recognize that there was likely some sarcasm in your comments Portia, just using them to illustrate a point.)

I'm sorry, but an interactive digital format is much, much more powerful than a text book. Having said that, I still highly prefer to read a novel from a real book than any digital reader I have seen. But if we are going to talk about the mediums ability to help in the learning process, digital wins by a long shot in my opinion.

[Fredjikrang]

Going back to Apple specifically, another big limitation is that at least for now, iBooks Author (the only program you can use to publish to Apple's book store) has no support for mathematical equations more complicated than 2+2. This rules right out any textbooks in math or the mathematical/physical sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.), certainly at the high school level, and obviously the college level. I'm sure they'll get around to fixing this deficiency eventually, but for now their format is unusable for these subjects. (The cynic in me points out that they obviously prioritized "Ooh, shiny!" features over actual textbook features.)

Um, did you look at the help? iBooks Author supports Mathtype, which is an industry standard. Sure, you'll have to buy it, but really, it doesn't cost that much for a publisher. *Edit* And anyone that has written any long document that includes mathematical formulas probably already has it.

[Laser Jock]

Um, did you look at the help? iBooks Author supports Mathtype, which is an industry standard. Sure, you'll have to buy it, but really, it doesn't cost that much for a publisher. *Edit* And anyone that has written any long document that includes mathematical formulas probably already has it.

Ah, the source I read that from must have been talking about iBooks Author itself, and not including add-ons. My mistake. You're right that it doesn't cost that much for a publisher, but it does take away a bit of the mass appeal of "We're releasing this authoring software for free" when there has to be an asterisk next to the claim in order for it to be usable for a large part of the textbook market.

You're wrong about your edit, though: it's pretty common in the mathematical sciences to use LaTeX, which is free, and is one of the gold standards for math typesetting. Some scientific journals do accept Word, so those people usually just use the built-in equation editor in Word.

Format supported in 10 years?: Probably. Formats such as this are usually supported for long periods of time. For example: PDF, .doc, etc. And even if it isn't, the content will be available in another format in the future. Are digital formats as long lived as physical ones? Maybe, maybe not. Depends on how they are kept.

Actually, although PDF is a good argument in your favor, .doc isn't. Try opening a Word document from 10 years ago with any degree of complex formatting and tell me how well that works. (Anecdotally, your chance of a hard-to-read result is quite high.) Or how about WordStar files from 20 years ago? Good luck tracking down something that can open them...

And the answer to "Are digital formats as long lived as physical ones?" is an unequivocal no. (I believe Katya may have meant this as a rhetorical question, though I could be wrong on that.) Books have been around for centuries, and no digital format (or storage medium) so far has even a prayer of still being usable after that long. This is a real problem for archivists the world over, who face having to migrate their collections to new media (and possibly to new formats) regularly or lose them. (For examples, see here and here.)