...these digital textbooks would arguably do a lot in the way of lightening the load for college students to worry about carrying/selling later..
The physical load is just one factor of many.
Carrying books isn't hard; you almost never carry more than one or two at a time. But unless Apple can drive prices down below $70 for even the most expensive books, it'll still be cheaper to buy the books and sell them back.
Only 1-2 books at a time = light course load. Must have taken you 8 years to get through high school, and another 12 to get through college
But more seriously, the "resale" element of eBooks for students is an important factor. Of course, what we also need to keep in mind is that the market for many textbooks is quite small, which means that the fixed costs to set them up for printing has far fewer copies to amortize that expense across to turn a profit. With a virtual book, this manufacturing cost literally disappears, so the retail cost of a college textbook should drop by easily 50%-75%. When the game changes from a $200 textbook to a $50 one, the resale cost factor becomes far less important.
Do Apple seriously believe the education system can afford for 20 iPads per classroom? ...
In the US Public Schools, they're already buying truckloads of Dell Laptops, but personally, I suspect that the thrust here would be to seek to getting it adopted at the College (University) level first.
And why is this announcement being held in New York?
Well, how about Roosevelt Island's new NYC TECH CAMPUS
Since I work directly in the eBook Market and work with academia, I feel the need to chime in.
The number one thing that both Libraries and students ask for are eText books.
The only thing preventing my company from providing them are the publishers.
There are very few digital text books (maybe 5 - 10%) available.
Text books are a cash cow for the publishers, which is why they do not offer many of their texts in digital. With print they're able to sell the same text book over and over again. And do!
The only way to get around this is by creating your own text books. This is a very expensive endeavor and only company with as much money in the bank as Apple could attempt this.
Agreed, we need to look at the various motivators. Of course, a marketplace venue that allows the traditional dead tree middleman to be cut out of the process by going to paperless publishing actually should open the doors for new textbooks, such as those that are to be written by a College's staff.
That's why I see the potential for Cornell in NYC to be an interesting crucible: it is a new start and with a strong tech focus.
I have a BS in MechEngr (decades ago).
Show me an animation of a mechanism with force vectors...
Now change the link parameters...
Change the forces acting on the links...
...These are basic enhancements that redefine etextbooks. E-ink isn't capable of this.
You mean one in which I can push/pull with my finger "...in the textbook..." on that Statics diagram and watch the deflections? And then push the ad-hoc model right into some FEA software to mesh it?
Oh, I very much see where you're going ... I'm in.
As a chemistry prof and tech enthusiast I am always on the look out for the next great thing and while this may be Apple's next great thing it will need something special to attract students.
There are already a number of electronic options out there, including regular ebooks, and none of them really offer anything compelling for someone who is happy with a paper book.
A Chem Prof buddy of mine has been working on his own textbook and watching the eMarket develop for the past couple of years - - what he sees as important is the ability for the researcher (student) to annotate and tag the reference guide. In the old days of our college years, our big innovation was the yellow highlighter...need something analogous, but better.
I just received a Kindle Touch for Christmas and have bought some Kindle books for it that were on sale, or I needed for my classes...In many cases, the books I looked at on the Kindle were more expensive than their paper counterparts. This is even more true on my iPad where the books were almost always more expensive.
This is a problem! While publishers say that there is more to a book than paper, it makes no sense that a digital edition would be more expensive than an electronic edition.
Agreed! The basic failiure for the marketplace to conform to known basic economic principles is why I've resisted buying eBooks: the effective elimination of their publishing investment risks should result in eBooks being dramatically less costly than a dead tree version...particularly since the dead tree version currently has better restribution/resale rights & mechanisms.
As we know, if anyone can bring order to the chaos it will be Apple. Problem is that there are a lot of people who refuse to drink the Cool Aid and refuse to use anything Apple related. That is another potential problem.
What Apple is more likely to bring is ... marketplace disruption. The current eBook business model is predominantly one of playing chicken -- the hopes that no one else cuts their prices so that everyone can stay fat. What I'm personally hoping for is that Cornell, through the NYC Tech Campus, is going self-publish many of their own texts through Apple and in doing so, be the disruptive force that this market needs to move out of the dark ages and help make advanced education (particularly science-tech based) more affordable.
-hh
