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."

Comments

Re:Don't we already have that?

[bcrowell]

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.

Re:$.99 Textbooks? Doubtful but...

[Colonel Korn]

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%.