Slashdot Mirror
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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/
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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.
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.
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.
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.