Fredjikrang wrote: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.
Setting aside the issue of format support (which LJ has addressed), do you have any idea how many books go out of print every year? No one is saying that classics or bestsellers will be unavailable in a digital format, but if someone writes a book for a niche market and only makes it available in one digital format, it's a very real possibility that book will be unreadable in 10 years.
Fredjikrang wrote: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.
Last year, my roommate borrowed a textbook from a friend who was a semester ahead of her in the same program. I can absolutely see lending a textbook under those same circumstances. Even if textbooks aren't lent out as frequently, the argument still applies to other types of books (and this is a huge HUGE issue for libraries).
Fredjikrang wrote: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.
The screen resolution of an iPad2 is 132 ppi. High-quality art printing is around 600 dpi (or 2400 dpi/4 color printing). It's true that you can zoom in on a picture, but then you can't see the entire picture any more. (This is a big reason that I think art books will be slow to migrate to a digital format, because the print quality and experience is still vastly superior.)
I'm not anti-digital by a long shot, but the benefits of digital formats tend show up in the short term, while the drawbacks become apparent in the long term, and not many people stop to think through the long term aspects.
Also, notice that there are two math textbooks already for sale on iTunes. Doesn't seem to be slowing them down any.
Last part. Neither K-12 students nor their teachers care about the archivability of a textbook. Hopefully they do care about how effectively it helps them learn/teach.
Okay, Katya, I would love to give a more long winded reply with my thoughts, but I've already spent way too much time on this. So, I'm going to be super brief.
First of all, remember that we are talking about K-12 textbooks. The objective of these books is, supposedly, to help young people learn the material.
Unreadable in 10 years: Maybe. But does it matter for a K-12 textbook? And remember, that although digital formats may not be used for long periods of time, they are highly portable, and so if the book is actually important to the people of the age, it could most likely be easily ported to another format. This is done all the time, even in physical media. (Microfilm, among others.)
Can you lend it to a friend: Remember. K-12 textbook. It costs at most $15. Does it really matter that much? Usually we lend things because of their relatively high cost. $15 takes care of this for anything more than short term lending, which you can still do. As for libraries. They are K-12 textbooks. Most libraries do not carry them anyway.
Resolution: They are K-12 textbooks, not high art textbooks. And, aside from that there is very, very little advantage of any print resolution over 300dpi, and "according to rumors" the next iPad will have a resolution that is about double that of the current generation, which is very close to the 300dpi "limit." Also, as for not being able to see the whole thing, there are two parts, size of the medium, and resolution. In a physical medium, if you want to see small detail beyond that 300dpi resolution, you would have to use a loupe anyway, which would not allow you to see the whole image, or get really close to the image, which again does not allow you to see the whole image. Now, imagine a 10 Gpixal image of the grand canyon. How big would you have to print it to be able to see the detail at a 300 dpi print resolution? How big would the digital medium have to be to see that same detail? The thing is, even in the physical world we do not see detail and the overall picture at the same time. It can be more intuitive in the physical realm, but certainly more practical in the digital one.
Out of curiosity, Katya, if "someone writes a book for a niche market and only makes it available" in one printing, how likely is it that you'll actually be able to find it anyways in ten years?
Marduk wrote:Out of curiosity, Katya, if "someone writes a book for a niche market and only makes it available" in one printing, how likely is it that you'll actually be able to find it anyways in ten years?
You might be surprised how many older books we acquire for our special collections department by buying them off of eBay, a used book seller, or by tracking down the author and asking for a copy. Due to the number of factors involved, I couldn't say how likely it would be for a particular book to be available, but I will say that acquiring such books isn't that uncommon for us. More to the point, if we acquire such a book now, we can rest assured that researchers and patrons will still be able to read it in ten years. If we acquired the book in digital format only, we'd have to keep upgrading the format (or trust that our content provider would still be around in ten years).
Agreed, it rarely is, though someone is going to have to figure out how to do it to solve the digital archive problem.
Okay, I really don't have time to be doing this, but I just wanted to say one last thing. For now.
I agree that digital texts aren't as easy to archive as print ones. However, I don't think that is the big question. In my mind, the question is, are digital text books more effective in helping K-12 children learn? If the answer is a significant yes, and the cost is not substantially greater than the current text books, then in my opinion, they should be used. I don't think that the archivability of the texts should be a deciding factor in this case.
Also, think of the other advantages for children outside of the standard K-12 system, such as home schooled children. Now, I have never been a big fan of homeschooling, though I would like to ask a parent who has done it about why they decided to teach their children in the home. But, this would also make text books much more available to these students, as they can buy the same books that the larger schools buy, and at a low price. Normally, a text book could be too expensive for a home school, as they don't have the volume of students, and so can't amortize the cost over several years. But, when they have that amortized cost for just one year, their possibilities are greater.
Wow. I'm late to this game, apparently. I won't bother trying to reply to every point made along the way, but I'll respond to what I see as the most important ones.
Overall thoughts
Apple's making a big play for the education space here. The tools they've introduced let you make content that's far more engaging and educational than the traditional textbook. If you haven't used one of these, you should really try it. Specifically, get the free chapters from E.O. Wilson's "Life on Earth" and play with it for a few minutes. The interactive content makes a huge difference in how much you learn. Seriously. Find this book and play with it. It's amazing. The high school textbooks they have there right now are decent, but I would hope to see far more interactive content in the future.
It will be interesting to see if this whole thing takes off. If so, I think it will be great for students, great for textbook authors, and at least decently good for teachers. The integration with the expanded iTunes U program also makes this a really exciting development for independent learners outside of an educational institution.
Restrictive Licensing Terms
In short, the rules are that if you're going to sell a something produced by Apple's "iBooks Author" app (either a PDF or an iBook file), then it must be sold in the iBooks store. If you're giving it away for free, you can post it anywhere you like. The content itself is under no such license; it's only the final output of iBooks Author that is under his restriction.
Some have painted this as draconian or overly restrictive. But remember, Apple doesn't make any money off the iBooks Author app itself; it's available to anyone with a Mac running OS X Lion for free. They could have chosen to make money on the sale of the app instead, but that would have reduced the amount of potential content available in the iBook store. Apple's not in this purely for altruistic reasons—they fully intend for this to be a profitable venture. So they've got to make money somehow. If they hadn't put in that restriction, then we'd likely see people downloading iBooks Author for free, then selling the end result on Amazon or something. Apple has no reason to give away a free tool that will only help their competitors. It seems to me that if they're giving away the creation app for free, then these licensing terms are the only ones that make sense.
Obviously, if you're wanting to make a book that can be sold everywhere, this isn't the right tool for you. But Apple doesn't care about that; they want people to make the kind of highly interactive books that can only work (at least for now) on the iPad. And if you're wanting to do that, then the licensing restriction isn't as big of a deal.
Cost
During the announcement, it was specified that $14.99 was the highest price that would be available for textbooks. Authors can't set a price higher than that. This was in the context of their announcement of an initial focus on high school textbooks, and it's possible that the restriction will change in time, but for now, $14.99 is the limit for ANY textbook, college or otherwise. As previously mentioned, this works for publishers because the books aren't reused, so they get a sale each year instead of once every 5-7 years. For roughly the same price (depending on how often they previously upgraded), schools get up-to-date textbooks instead of old ones.
Yes, the cheapest iPad 2 right now currently costs $499. But all the rumors say that a new iPad will be announced here within a couple months. I think it's very likely that we'll see the iPad 2 continue to be offered at a lower price, with the new one taking the $499 slot. So in the end, the cost may not be quite as prohibitive as it initially appears. And if it is, then we'll just have to see whether the benefits are worth the additional cost.
Lending books
Yeah, it would be really nice if iBooks had a way to lend books. The Kindle has it (at least for some content), and everyone loves it. I suspect this won't happen immediately, because if it did then schools would just lend the $15 book to their students, and the publishers would be out lots and lots of money. The lack of lending is definitely a downside of the iBooks ecosystem.
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Anyway, I'm excited to see what happens here. The skeptic in me assumes that it will probably get limited adoption, mostly in wealthy school districts. But I hope that it can go much further than that, because the ability to interact with the learning material makes a huge difference in how well you retain it.
I think that something that is really important to remember here as well is that Apple is playing an interesting game. They know that this isn't going to be an instant thing. It is going to take some time. They obviously think that they have products in the pipeline that will make it even more compelling. So even though looking at what is available now it might not make a lot of sense, remember that there will be new hardware and books available before anyone really starts to use it, namely this next fall.
I really hope that they can get it to work, and I'm pretty sure that there are a bunch of Apple reps. doing everything they can to get schools to try it out in at least a limited scope in this next school year.
And I think that people would be surprised by how many teachers already have iPads. I know that in my dad's school there are a lot of teachers that already have one, making it easy for them to evaluate books and decide if it would be worth it for them, in their class.
For Katya's sake, though, I do agree that archival of digital works is a huge unsolved problem. If anyone has a brilliant idea for how to solve that problem, I suspect you could make a ton of money.
It's not the quality I worry about. It's the rate at which digital date corrupts. We put everything on hard drives and DVDs. And even after just a year we'd have some go bad. We did everything in pairs, but every once in awhile both would go bad. And who as the time (and money to pay someone) to go through all of the drives and DVDs to make sure they're all still good?
Dragon Lady wrote:It's not the quality I worry about. It's the rate at which digital date corrupts. We put everything on hard drives and DVDs. And even after just a year we'd have some go bad. We did everything in pairs, but every once in awhile both would go bad. And who as the time (and money to pay someone) to go through all of the drives and DVDs to make sure they're all still good?
Right. Digital data is incredibly easy to carry, store, and transmit, but it's not designed to last a long time (and the same could be said of most of the devices that read digital data). You can't create a digital file, store it and then assume that it will be good to go in one or five or ten years. If you want it to last, you need to back it up, copy it to newer media types, and test that the file isn't corrupted, over and over again. That's an incredibly expensive and inefficient process.
Interestingly, there's an parallel in the printed world when it comes to newsprint. Newspapers are printed on very cheap paper which is highly acidic in content, which means that the paper degrades very quickly. Since most people toss out newspapers after a few days, that's not an issue for readers. However, local newspapers are an invaluable source of information for historians, so libraries and archives are highly interested in preserving newspapers. There are ways to deacidify newsprint, but it's an expensive and time consuming process because you're working to preserve an item that wasn't designed to last for a long period of time.
My brother told me about this the other day. It seems very pertinent to this discussion. Maybe there is a long-term storage solution in the future! (For those who don't like to click, like me, it's a company that is physically imprinting into DVDs, making them a much more permanent solution than the current dye solution that corrupts easily.)
Hmm. That is actually pretty interesting. And the drives are relatively cheap. You still need to be able to interpret the data, but at least it is available now.
