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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."
Let's hope this will loosen the grip of the major publishing companies. Paying $150 for a textbook (at least in the US) because you HAVE to get the newest revision to correct a few spelling mistakes is bullshit!
gasmonso ReligiousFreaks.com
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.
Someone made computers cool for the general public. The horror.
I think some of the Apple hatred stems from the fact that many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives. Mastering a system is gratifying on many levels. When a company offers a platform that doesn't allow or require that kind of micro-management and control, it's really like an attack on the person directly, especially when the product is popular among non-techies--many of the same people who alienated that person in the first place. And so there's resentment.
The only reason I say all this is that concerns like yours don't exist in the general populace; it doesn't even cross their minds that it would be a problem. They see the lack of open-endedness as simplification and refinement that makes the devices easier to use. As Steve Jobs use to say, something "mere mortals" could use. So I say again, I think it's awesome that the public is allowed to be excited about things like "ePub" and "digital distribution" rather than rely on nerds like us to trickle it down to the rest of the population.
I disagree. I learnt to install Solaris before I have ever installed Dos/Windows. My computer throughout college was my trusty Apple //gs and the OSF/1 box with the huge black and white 21" monochrome monitor - damn, it was a fine monitor. I learnt to manage VMS, UNIX, installed Slackware Linux from 50+ floppies. I am one of the few rare people to have actually bought a copy of WordPerfect for Linux :) Used Gentoo for years and years, building from stage 1 when that was all that was available.
I still run OpenBSD at home as my outside facing server.
And I find Macs easy to use. For the stuff I need to do, it's easy. For the technical stuff, I can get right into the innards of it for the most part. Opensource stuff is downright easy. MacPorts if available. Otherwise, ./configure and make. Built a couple of hackintoshes for fun.
The OP was just being stupid. MP3s have been un-DRM"ed for quite a few years now - Apple was the one pushing for it, but of course, OP conveniently forgets that.
Apple also contributes back - they made so much improvements into KDE's browser that KDE just basically re-absorbed back in the entire webkit, among other things.
Apple is "exciting" people about "technology" the same way Louis Vuitton is "exciting" people about, you know, apparel design and textile technology. Both companies sell an image and the fashion accessories to build it, and most people buy their products exactly as a fashion accessory.
I am periodically reminded why headhunters don't lurk on Slashdot to find the next generation of innovating CEOs.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
many techies absorb themselves in computers because it gives them a feeling of control that they lack in their daily lives
I don't believe you think more than skin-deep about the dangers of the "walled garden" approach. The problem with Apple is very simple -- they have delegated themselves a right to approve how do you use "their" device and a right to charge you a tithe for everything that comes to you on "their" hardware. In effect, you've relinquished ownership, and, unlike some other platforms, you have no legal way out.
Game consoles have had "walled gardens" (ugh, that term) for decades, approving all software that appears on their devices, and the world hasn't fallen apart. To the contrary, consoles surpassed PCs as the primary gaming platforms several years ago. The world also hasn't fallen apart since Apple began approving software on its devices; in fact, iOS remains #1 in customer satisfaction surveys.
Clearly, non-techies prefer these kinds of platforms. Like I said before, the issues you raise are not even considered a problem outside of tech forums. Normal people don't care if they can't install absolutely everything under the sun, because they wouldn't want to even if they could. Nobody is putting a gun to anyone's head and forcing them to buy an iPad, so the victim angle doesn't work either.
You need to understand that it's not a black-and-white situation. Apple platforms may be perfect for other people but not for you. Just because you don't like Apple doesn't mean nobody else should use their platforms and that the world should be rid of their evil. It just means other people use those platforms and you use whatever you use, and the world keeps on turning.
Also, software freedom is only a small part of it. Think of other possibilities that the Apple approach prevents. Even if an independent business and an owner of an Apple device both think there is a business mode they both can benefit from, which mode does not go through the Apple-approved system, they cannot achieve it easily, and hence cannot exploit the full potential of the hardware platform to their advantage. This is especially bad for the person who has paid the price for the Apple device.
If Apple isn't meeting their needs, the independent business can choose to use a different platform. Nobody is forced to use an Apple device, so again, the "freedom" argument is silly and really comes down to techies trying to maintain control in order to feel a sense of mastery over something, in my opinion.