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Goodbye Textbooks, Hello iPad
PolygamousRanchKid writes "Students and teachers in grade school through higher education are using the iPad to augment their lessons or to replace textbooks. Jennifer Kohn's third grade class at Millstone Elementary School in Millstone, New Jersey, mastered the iPad with minimal training. For the most part, the students didn't need to be taught how to use their apps, Kohn says. College students are also turning to the iPad to do what they do instinctively well: saving themselves money. Marianne Petit, a New York University staff member, recently began taking credits in pursuit of another certification, and uses her iPad in place of textbooks. 'The price of the iPad pays for itself after a single semester,' Petit said. 'iPad books cost so much less it's a legal alternative for students who are using BitTorent [to pirate books].' Like the PC before it, Kohn noted that the iPad isn't a panacea for educators: It has its appropriate time and place. 'I don't use them with every lesson or even day. It's not always appropriate to lesson or objective of what I'm trying to teach,' Kohn noted."
The case of textbooks is special for many reasons. First, students (and I am talking University Students here) MUST buy them. No choice in the matter. Second, there has long been a lively secondary market for used books. This infuriated the main line publishers, that they couldn't get fresh money for fresh books every semester/quarter/year. Third, to counter this, they collude with the authors, and have frequent revisions. Never changing much, but enough that lesson plans would be altered with the wrong edition text. Thus, it is rare that a text is god for more than 2 years between revisions.
Couple that with the fact that there is a limited run on text books (never a large production run), a captive market, and thus really high prices, and you get a very warped market. The publishers are actually happy to sell a reduced price electronic version, DRM'd, to each student, and cut out the secondary resellers.
That said, when I chased my Physics degree, for my core, I always bought new, marked them up, and keep them. Today, my two volumes of Graduate level Quantum server merely to intimidate coworkers.
Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress
There are no discounts. The students are downloading illegal copies of books.
Until you get to college anyway. Then the publishers "lobby" the professors just like big corps lobby the congressmen, and get them to change what textbook they "require" for their class every few years. Books bought in the spring for $250 are bought back by the book stores that fall for $24 because they won't be used there next semester.
It would be nice if universities required the profs to list the book costs and the average resale value of books bought for their classes in the course list. Then when you had three profs teaching African History and two of them have average end costs of $100 and one has $300 because the prof keeps changing books, enrollment for that one prof plummets and his department head threatens to cut that class off the list. That's the only way to fix that problem.
Hard to say how effective it would be though - so many college students haven't learned how to manage money and are on a "spend/charge/loan now, worry about pay later when I get a lucrative job" attitude that they really don't pay as much attention to up-front costs as they should.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
This is absolutely wrong. My wife's Math books last semester were $400 more for the text book over the e-book version. That paid for our new iPad.
But there are requirements to list books and prices! The federal Higher Education Opportunity Act requires colleges and universities to make public lists of books and other materials that will be required for each course by the time of students are expected to enroll in those courses. This was supposed to drive down the cost of textbooks because it will give students more time to find online prices. As a professor, I haven't noticed much of a change since this law took effect in July 2010, the prices in the bookstore are still outrageous.
You've actually got that completely backwards. Companies go to great pains to prevent their trademarked names from being diluted to the point that they become generic terms for a product category. In fact, companies like Xerox have taken out ads in publications like Writers Digest imploring authors to not abuse their trademark by using their trademarked name as a verb, as in "I xeroxed a copy" (note the lower case).
The reason is that trademarks, unlike copyrights and patents, must be actively defended to be maintained. That's one of the big differences between trademark and copyright. If you don't actively defend your trademark, it can ruled to have been abandoned and you will lose your exclusive right to use it in the marketplace. On the other hand, by rigorously defending your trademark, it can effectively last forever, unlike copyrights which (theoretically) expire.
Companies definately want you to think of their products first, but you will find them very hostile if you use their trademarked name generically, especially if it's to describe a similar product offered by a competitor.
I don't care why you're posting AC