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Apple Intends To 'Digitally Destroy' Textbook Publishing
bonch writes "Apple is expected to announce e-book creation and social interaction tools at their January 19 media event taking place in New York, the heart of the publishing industry. Along with expanded interactivity features such as test-taking, the event is expected to showcase an ePub 3-compatible 'Garageband for e-books' to address the lack of simple digital publishing tools. Steve Jobs reportedly considered textbook publishing to be 'an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction' and was directly involved with Apple's efforts in this area until his death."
www.bookboon.com are doing a good job providing free textbooks, written by Profs
This could be interesting. The biggest problem with this is the way the market works. Okay, so we make a book. The physical cost of the book (your college chemistry book) was $3.65. Once you included in the author, the editor, salesperson's salary, MY salary in IT, etc, it was $45. We sold it to the bookstores for that, then they sold it for $65. Which means that we could theoretically sell it for $42. Not a huge saving... except when you include that middleman charging $20 more.
So, if we were to sell this via iBooks/Kindle/etc, the biggest problem is that bookstore - the reason for a new edition every 2 years was to combat the used book market. Sure, things got tweaked, but it was to make sure people kept buying the book. They make a LOT of money by physically holding those books for a few weeks. And if a publisher went digital to cut the bookstores out of the market - well, the bookstores would decide they wouldn't carry ANY books by that publisher, and the publisher would Go Away. (Supposedly this happened once in the early 90s, though I don't know who.)
But if Apple got involved? They could bring a lot of muscle to bear, since this isn't Sink Or Swim for them. That being said, the bookstores would still boycott the publisher, etc, etc.
Sidenote: the publisher I worked for had come up with a solution, albeit with lock-in. Pay X dollars per student, get access to all of our books. I'm sure there was a discount. I'm sure everyone here can see the problems with that, though it's the only halfway-decent scheme I saw.
Aren't most e-readers able to display PDF files?
Yes, but the experience sucks. For example, if the pdf was formatted with lines of text 18 cm wide, but you're viewing it on a reader with a 10 cm-wide screen, you're going to have to scroll back and forth with every line you read -- or resize it so small that the font becomes illegible.
converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
Calibre works fine on some things, but not others. For example, it has no math support (basically because none of the output formats it supports, such as epub 2, have any math support).
I don't buy the claim in the Ars article that the big thing standing in the way of digital textbooks is that the tools for creating them are nonexistent, not good enough, or too hard to use. First off, textbook publishers have paid professionals who do this sort of thing. And in any case, the real barrier is that the ebook formats are extremely limited. The big issue for math and science textbooks is that the kindle and epub 2 formats don't support math properly. (You can display equations as bitmaps, but only if they're placed on a line by themselves in the middle of the page. Bitmapped equations won't scale properly when the user selects a different font, and they aren't accessible to blind people.) Epub 3 includes mathml, which is great, but there are currently zero readers on the market that support epub 3+mathml. Amazon has recently come out with the latest version of the kindle format, and it does not include math, so it seems unlikely that there will be math on the kindle in the foreseeable future. If and when readers start to support epub 3+mathml, there is no major technical barrier to creating textbooks with math in them. If you have tools to create xhtml+mathml (which are very easy to find), then it's trivial to create epub 3+mathml, because epub is basically just a set of html files packaged together in a zip file. Some OSS, such as epubcheck, already supports epub 3. I'm sure that tools such as Calibre will provide the necessary support (which will not be hard to do) once there is support from readers, although there is little motivation for the developers to do it right now, since there will no device that can actually do anything with the resulting file.
In any case, let's be realistic about what all this means. These books will have DRM, just like all commercial ebooks have already. The books will be priced just as exploitatively as current textbooks are, because the publishers know that that's what college students are currently paying.
Find free books.
I am. Good riddance to an evil industry. Even better, since these e-textbooks will be digitally transferred, it won't be long before some smart people figure out how to pirate them, so even if they try to change obscene amounts for the ePub versions, rampant piracy will help keep costs down for struggling students.
It's a lot easier, faster, and cheaper to email copies of a .epub file to all your friends, or better yet to post it on BitTorrent, than to go to Kinko's and make thousands of copies of paper. Of course, a paper textbook could be scanned into .pdf form, but even so someone has to take the time to do it first, and either have a lot of time on their hands to scan page-by-page on a flatbed scanner, or have access to a $$$$$ automated scanner.
How the fuck is this insightful when Apple has been the one keeping the price of content down traditionally? You forgetting the $1.99 and $2.99 RIAA was asking for, for single tracks?!
Dumbass.
You are ignorant. Apple raised the default ebook price when they entered the digital publishing market with the iPad. Amazon had set a very low ebook price and Apple colluded with publishers who were upset that Amazon was actually subsidizing the price by selling it below cost in order to raise ebook prices by 50%. With a large digital publishing alternative to Amazon, the publishers forced Amazon to raise prices by 50% as well. Thanks to Apple's meddling, most ebook prices went up by 50%. This was widely publicized when it happened - we even discussed it on Amazon.
So to reiterate, the GP is insightful because Apple's only previous digital publishing endeavor was based around Apple negotiating to raise all prices for ebooks by 50%.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
The vast majority of cell phones (including all the popular ones) before the iPhone and Android were the ultimate in walled gardens. Remember paying your carrier if you wanted to get your pictures off your RAZR?
Do you know how most textbooks are written?
One or more professors get together and say "hey, how about making a textbook about this?" Quite often this is because they have to teach a class on that topic and don't like any of the existing textbooks. These are the editors.
The editors pitch their idea to a publisher. If the publisher likes it, they say, sure, go for it. Now the editors ask their colleagues to contribute to the textbook. Chapters get written.
Finally, when the book is all put together (and I do mean all put together - the last chapter I wrote for a textbook had to be formatted just so, by me) it goes off to the publisher. Oh, and by the way, if anybody in that chain gets paid (other than the publisher), it's the editors, and it's not very much. But everybody gets to put it on their CV, which for an academic is supposed to be MUCH better than money. Or so we tell ourselves.
Now, I'm sure the publisher does more than just print off the book and market it, but it's not a whole lot more, and it's certainly not something that a big company like Apple couldn't do.
No, I don't remember ever having to pay to get pictures off my phone, and my "walled garden" phones have had "app" markets and "music" markets since about 2000 for prices that were comparable to the iTunes and the Android markets.
That's simply not true. I used to be a Symbian developer. Around 2002-2005, I charged $10 for an image warping app, that seemed to be about the right price from looking around at what other apps were out there. The same kind of thing goes for 99c on the iPhone.
And the app used to be sold in a zip file, which the user had to download, unzip and then install from their PC. Again, standard practice for the time. There weren't any platforms that had the automated purchase-download-install workflow that the Apple App Store has.
In another post you asked me what a freetard is. This is a good demonstration. Not only are they fans of "open", "free", GPL etc. (the free bit) They also say things that aren't true in their trying to persuade everyone of their point of view (the tard bit).
There were no mobile platforms before the Apple App Store that offered automated purchase-download-install workflow,
You're obviously unfamiliar with i-mode and i-appli and Bree/Java development for Japanese carriers. These were exactly automated purchase-download-install workflows.
They sell out of WWDC tickets pretty fast.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Tablets were "wildly popular" before Apple came along?
Smartphones *maybe* - since Blackberry certainly had a good following, but it was nowhere near the market penetration that came when iPhone and Android were selling the "classic" touchscreen phone.
The mp3 player was certainly not "wildly popular" with the general public. Not even close. There were certainly portable mp3 players, but they were a niche product - if the iPod killed anything it was MiniDisc (in all countries except the US), the discman and the walkman. At the time, the concept of music as files on your computer was the realm of the extremely tech-savvy computer geek. Apple just took it mainstream.
You were doing well right up until claiming that "image" is Apple's only real product - to do so is a gross underestimation and, given that many other manufacturers seem to think as you do, why they have such problems creating products that compete favourably with Apple ones. Android manufacturers cottoned on to this pretty quickly and as a result have made some very good phones after listening to what their customers want (note: you don't need to copy Apple for Apple's model to work - Apple's method is to make something that people want to buy, so as long as you do that, you'll sell).
If Apple was "all image" then they might manage a large number of sales to start with, then they would quickly fall off as word of the product spread. This is also known as the "box office turd" effect, where the opening weekend is huge but then drops off like a rock. Apple's product sales are much more like the box office hit - big opening weekend, strong sales long into the run. If the products were not delivering on expectations (and not necessarily those of the slashdot geek who wants to compile Linux on his phone every 3 days) then they would not continue to sell in ever increasing numbers - marketing will not do that for you in the presence of a terrible product.