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Apple Unveils Software To Reinvent the Textbook
redletterdave writes "At the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple announced on Thursday it would update its iBooks platform to include textbook capabilities and also added a new platform called iBooks Author, which lets anyone easily create and publish their own e-books. Apple's senior VP of marketing, Phil Schiller, introduced iBooks 2, which has a new textbook experience for the iPad. The books themselves display larger images, and searching content is made significantly easier: all users need to do is tap on a word and they are taken straight to an appropriate glossary or index section in the back of the book. Navigating pages and searching is also easy and fluid, and at the end of each chapter is a full review with questions and pictures. If you want the answers to the questions, all you need to do is tap the question to get instant feedback. Apple also launched the iBooks Author app, which lets anyone easily create any kind of textbook and publish it to the iBookstore, and the new iTunes U platform, which helps teachers and students communicate better, and even send each other materials and notes created with iBooks Author. All of the apps are free, and available for any and all students, from K-12 to major universities."
It was a textbook example of a product launch.
MacRumors has full live coverage of the event with pictures. I couldn't tell if I'm able to just read my damn books on my Mac, though. Hope I don't have to use iBooks Author to do it.
"Reinvent" is a big word. But the most significant thing I see here is that the tools - including and especially the content development tools - are free (as in beer). But the next question is, what iBook tools will be available on other platforms?
If is closed, propietary format then no matter if the app to use them in a specific hardware device is free. Those books (or us) don't have a future.
I would really hate to see textbooks and other such informational sources be controlled through the iTunes market place. Maybe if the documents were in a DRM free format and available across different platforms but apple is not known for playing nice and sharing its toys to the benefit of anyone but its self.
I got here through a series of tubes
I'm not really sold on the idea that we need interactive textbooks, I've never had a textbook that wasn't very sufficiently searchable using the contents and index, and I don't see how you can keep a straight face and make the argument that a $400+ iPad is more durable than a $30 textbook, especially in a school environment where some textbooks can last for a decade or more.
Apple may want the iPad to be the standard with all their little monopolistic heart, but I just don't see it happening anywhere but in random charter or magnet schools who want to show everyone how hip they are with the new technology.
As a university professor and a mac user, I'm the obvious target for software like this, and in many respects it looks very attractive. However, I can't, in good conscience, force my students onto a particular platform, and that's what using this for course materials would do. I suppose it would be good if the university required all students to buy and iPad (and that's probably Apple's goal here), but without that it's useless. Proprietary formats like iBooks or the Kindle are out, and I'll continue to distribute materials to my students as pdf files, despite the limitations of that format.
Will make it far easier to manipulate and censor the past, and thus control the future. E-books should be a convenient option to complement existing dead tree versions, not replace them.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The iPad is the wrong platform for this
I'd have thought that it would depend.
I would much prefer an eInk screen for readability, since the backlit screen of my iPad causes my eyes to feel strained after prolonged reading. However, I also like to mark up and annotate my documents (be they articles, texts or otherwise), and, of all the devices I have tried so far, the iPad offers the best experience for this. I've studied all of my masters degree so far without printing a single page, using my iPad for all the reading, and it seems to have worked out okay — but an eInk screen capable of supporting annotations conveniently would be fantastic. For the moment, though, for me, the iPad is right, simply because it is the least wrong.
The innovation is packaging those technologies and making it easy for publishers to use them.
The new ibooks format looks like a ZIP container containing xhtml, images (including jpeg, png and svg), javascript based widgets (created with Dashcode, similar to OS X widgets). I see h.264 movies in there as well. I haven't found the 3d stuff (don't know if there's any 3d in this one). And it's all in a nice package that you can download once and toss on a device.
Unlike Sigil, iBooks Author can embed much more multimedia and appears to make it much easier to build documents. Building the capabilities to do flashcards and interactive review sections into the client app so that lots of books can take advantage of it. Before now, publishers could do this sort of thing in a browser over the internet, or they could write their own mobile app that displayed the content, but they had to build a lot of that infrastructure themselves.
Apple's building on our current technologies and has actually gotten publishers to start using them. I think that's pretty cool.
What the hell does an iPad do that cheaper full fledged computers haven't been able to do for ages?
It can sit on your desk alongside your books, papers, pencils and not take up all the space. You can carry it around, and it has a great form-factor for using it as a tool.
Typical geek error: You think this is about technological capabilities, specs - it isn't. It is about design, about integration into the workflow, about everything around the device as much as the device itself.
if I had an iPad to play with in class in school, I don't think much learning would have happened.
That absolutely is the #1 argument against an iPad or any other multi-purpose electronic gadget. Then again, if pupils want to play, they will. Back in my days, we played on paper. Worked, too.
And come on, it's Apple and we all know Apple can do no wrong.
They've done plenty of wrong. The reason you don't hear much about it is that unlike MS they don't keep their mistakes around for ages, spending billions on them until either they are so dead that they have to bury them because they start to smell (Zune), or the sheer amount of money and exclusivity-deals and other niceties that money can buy make it into a viable thing (xbox).
Apple buries its mistakes and moves on. Doesn't mean they don't make plenty of mistakes.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Publishers and authors of textbooks hate used books because they don't get any additional revenue. Which is why you'll see your standard freshman class books change every other year. How does Calc 101 change every year? The author changes one example replacing X with Y, and then can rev the book and get another $45 in revenue.
With an eBook with DRM, they'll make it so while the book might not cost $45, every student will be forced to buy it 'new' every year.
I love how the iPad haters sound just like the Republicans. Make up things to reinforce their point of view.
The ipad does not have a very small viewing angle, get over that blatent lie. yes it's a shiny surface, so is most laptops and other color e-readers. where it has a REAL failure is you can not read on one in direct sunlight. this is because of a poor choice of LCD. A trans reflective LCD solves this. MY Fujitsu tablet has one and the screen is better outside (and still shiny) Blocky low res?? have you ever touched an ipad?
the ipad is a AWESOME device or textbooks, reading about dinosaurs and having animations or being able to have interactive parts is incredibly cool. Every classroom I see them using the ipad the kids are enthralled and are learning at a far faster rate. Yes there are schools with them in the classrooms now, My company installed 2900 of them to a regular old school district last year. The teacher can broadcast to the proejctor or 55" lcd in the room via a apple TV and airplay so the kids can all see what she is doing or talking about. They are wonderful devices for this.
Finally test taking ON the ipad rocks. and they are durable as hell in the right case. I watched a 6 year old ADHD brat throw one to the ground and jump up and down on it. On the SCREEN, not the back. no damage in that special case they bought for the kids ipads to go into.
The problem is people are making up reasons to NOT use them simply because they are incapable of reasoning why they do work. It's the grumpy old man syndrome and you have it pretty bad.
The kindle is a failure at text books for 2 reasons. 1 - too damn small. Sorry but only the Kindle DX is big enough for textbooks, and those are as much as an ipad. 2 - no software for education, no interactive books, no way to show it's screen on a larger screen for sharing. Kindle = fail in K-12.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I've been looking for a good way to create ePub files for my iPad for some time now. I use a number of different reference materials I've created for myself and others in environments where you're simply not going to have Internet access, and the iPad has been an ideal tool for this. The iBooks Author app is free, looks well-polished (like Pages and Keynote) and seems interesting with its promises of easily-implemented interactivity. I'm a little concerned about how the HTML widgets will be used... the idea of having content in a book that's always up to date is intriguing... but if you are somewhere you don't have Internet access will it display the last version seen or a 404 Not Found error message?
The app is available now on the Mac App Store, but it's worth noting that it's only available for the Mac and only runs on OS X Lion.
Text book updates are free, much as iOS App updates are.
And they are working WITH the publishers, not excluding them. Much as they worked with the record labels rather than trying to exclude them.
What the hell does an iPad do that cheaper full fledged computers haven't been able to do for ages?
It's a lot more convenient to carry around, and a lot more comfortable to read books on.
1). It says that the iBooks Author program can export to PDF.
2). WHY? PDF is an awful format for reading, especially on a device where the orientation can change. PDFs do not reflow text when the layout changes. And you can mark and annotate stuff on most other ebook formats just fine.
A closed format like.... ePub.
Mmmmm.
Try again.
Free authoring tools, free app, HTML5-based books...
Totally the opposite direction to free and available!
those $100 books the schools buy can be used by 100 kids per day for years. now with kids buying $15 books per semester or per year i bet the publishers are going to make a lot more money.
30 books at $100 each is $3000 before the sales drone commissions.
30 students per class/6 classes per teacher is 180 kids buying their own book at $15. $2700 before apple's commission.
but now every kid will have to buy the book since the books won't be shared over the years. and how much you want to be they will introduce the college scam of updating the books a little every year or dumbing them down so that every grade needs a fresh set of books
That would alleviate some of my concerns, but from the engaged writeup: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks." (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apples-ibooks-author-hands-on/#continued) Not too open.
While having slick creation tools is a cool thing, this won't end up working for public K-12 schools, at least in California. There's this thing called the Williams Case which requires all schools to have one copy of a textbook for each student in a class. Sure, the case was decided before digital textbooks were a possibility, but this has caused significant problems already with digital textbooks. Schwarzenegger tried with the digital textbook initiative to get things started, and there are even free, CC licensed, editable books out there already (disclaimer: I am an author for CK12). Nobody is using them because of the problems surrounding Williams compliance.
So while tools are nice, the problem is infrastructure and law. Which are, unfortunately, most of the problems those of us in education face when trying to make things better.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
Or at least I hope the iPad 3 comes in a 256GB version, because the first 51 pages of "Life on Earth" weigh in at about 1GB. A fully interactive AND full-length textbook at 19MB/page is going to end up being something like 16GB per book. And the authoring costs for something like this produced through a traditional author/publisher process are going to make the things cost way more than a traditional textbook to produce, so will publishers really be on board to charge people less than the typical $120 or so that they want for the much simpler dead-tree edition?
But this technology looks like it holds great hope for community developed collaborative works, though it's not clear if there's a mechanism for collaboration, or whether the sort of people who would be involved in such a collaboration are going to be willing to buy into a proprietary platform-locked technology. Hopefully Apple's efforts will at least inspire the community to come up with similar capabilities.
G.
The article from Ars Technica on this subject brings an interesting view point on the 'simplicity' of the tool set. This is all great and wonderful, but I suspect it will end up like other 'easy' technologies in primary and secondary eduction. Companies will think there is a simple path, educators will be dumped into the middle of it and the result will be classrooms of poorly implemented technology. Worse yet will be states that create new focus groups to identify the curriculum needed in the class room and schools will be forced to purchase technology they cannot use.
Educators need open source material that allows them to quickly mix-and-match to meet their teaching needs and the needs of the children. Bringing a new technology to bear can only go so far if the material available to them is still sub-par from an industry publisher. Besides, with 'approved' material being mostly copyrighted, the educators and schools will still have to pay high prices to access the information.
Making it easy to mash-up material is not going to make it more accessible and won't help improve the ability to teach and learn.
This should save Texas a lot of time next time they want to rewrite school text books in the interest of religion.
Censorship - Now there's and App for that!
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/09/14/news-release-district-deploys-1300-ipad-alternatives-to-assure-ayp/
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They're a bit late to this game, Amazon is pretty entrenched with Kindles already in most people's hands, and at prices which are far more approachable than iPads.
What's entrenched: Apple, with millions of iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads in the hands of teenagers and college students.
Please help metamoderate.
"Work" refers to the generated output of iBooks Author. In other words, the exclusivity covers the .ibook file generated by Apple's tool, but you are free to sell the book in other ePub formats on other platforms. Also, you can provide the book for free on your website.
I just downloaded the "iBook Author" app. It's neat. But it has no cabability to enter maths. Until Apple adds LaTeX support, this is not going to fly in maths and physics at the university level. I do research in applied mathematics for a living. In the texts I write, over 50% of the page space is covered with formulae. That's just the way maths works. I also need special characters (various binary operators, calligraphic, fraktur and blackboard bold symbols, ...), not just Greek letters and sum symbols.
There's another catch, which also applies to other fields, not just my personal niche: It's nice that I can add 3D models, videos and all. But creating these kinds of objects takes a lot of time. Time that expert authors don't have. It will be interesting to see how this works out in schools, but I'm not holding my breath regarding graduate academic writing.
And don't forget they'll have to buy the book every year.
My bigger concern: I'm an engineer. I use ALL of the books I took for my engineering courses. How long will those books remain in updated, usable formats? How long will my license be for? Will it only apply when someone is a student, and they'll have to purchase the book again after graduation?
From: http://9to5mac.com/2012/01/19/apples-textbook-announcement-later-today-new-iosmac-software-rumored/
In fact Jobs had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he wanted to transform. He believed it was an $8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so kids have to lug a heavy backpack around. “The iPad would solve that,” he said. His idea was to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad. In addition, he held meetings with the major publishers, such as Pearson Education, about partnering with Apple. “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt,” he said. “But if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”
The problem at the local school level is the corrupt process for certification. Jobs viewed this as a way around that. Simply give the books away as part of the iPad.
This is *precisely* what I've seen as a father of 6 (yes, SIX) homeschooled children. Normal K12 textbooks are so simply written that they are agonizing to study from. I've generally had far better results simply buying the collegiate "101" subject introductions and having my 14 year old (ish) kids study from that.
Strangely, textbooks seem to get *better* as you move away from the mainstream K-12 books: remedial textbooks are often better when a student is having trouble with a subject, because their focus is on explaining the basic concepts rather than including overviews of minutiae, and college textbooks are better at the other end because they are intended to be actually comprehensive rather than provide summaries with too little information to be useful.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Actually, it depends on what you define as 'work'. For certain aspects of my work (as a science writer), the iPad is a fantastic device. I can work anywhere, read academic publications with ease, and even write monthly columns. My former laptop was stolen; I replaced it with an iPad, and the productivity increase has been huge. This is just my experience, though, and it won't hold for many professions. But don't make such sweeping generalisations unless you look at life outside your cubicle!
Give a man a fire, and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. (Terry Pratchett)
There's another catch, which also applies to other fields, not just my personal niche: It's nice that I can add 3D models, videos and all. But creating these kinds of objects takes a lot of time. Time that expert authors don't have.
Your thinking seems antiquated, from many decades past. Textbooks are no longer just text with graphics so simple that the typical author could manage it. Art, graphics and accompanying software often comes from others. I was once part of a team that did the software accompanying a chemistry textbook, we also did some of the videos demonstrating various concepts. Our work would have fit in quite well with this Apple initiative.
And they are working WITH the publishers, not excluding them. Much as they worked with the record labels rather than trying to exclude them.
So what you mean is that we will be stuck with crappy DRM until serious competition forces them to change?
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Why don't the authors do what Best Buy, Staples, Walmart, etc. do to prevent people from price matching. Carry the exact same product, except the model number and one or two trivial features are slightly different. The iBook store can have the -i version which is formatted in LucidiaGrande like the Macs. Amazon can have the -k version in Caecilia like the Kindle. Insert page breaks so the page numbers match up.
As far as I can tell looking at the information provided by Apple, there's no legal requirement that free iBooks _must_ be distributed solely through the iTunes store. You can export in the native .iba format to the desktop or email the same file to anyone, which can then be loaded onto any iPad for viewing. Of course, the same can be done with a .pdf of the same work. You're only tied to the iTunes store if you want to make a buck off your book.
If you have specifics indicating differently, please provide them.
That would alleviate some of my concerns, but from the engaged writeup: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks." (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apples-ibooks-author-hands-on/#continued) Not too open.
Let me repeat that with context: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish for a fee must be an exclusive to iBooks." There is nothing that says you can't give away the eBooks for free outside of iBooks. http://venomousporridge.com/post/16126436616/ibooks-author-eula-audacity quotes the license thusly:
B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:
(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.
Fuck, why should Apple give away an authoring tool so anyone but them can profit from it by selling it on Amazon? Yet they still allow you to give away any books made with it for free any way you want. What more do you want?
Fandroids hate facts.