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Apple Nets 350K Textbook Downloads In 3 Days
redletterdave writes "On Jan. 19, Apple introduced iBooks 2, its digital solution to the physical textbook. In the first three days of release, users have downloaded more than 350,000 e-textbooks from the new platform, and more than 90,000 users have downloaded the authoring tool to make those e-textbooks, called iBooks Author. It makes sense that Apple's iBooks 2 platform is taking off in such a short period of time; there is very little merit to the physical textbook, and the education industry has been waiting for a viable solution like this for some time. Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
...that you can resell a physical textbook, sometimes, and that cuts into textbook publisher profits.
The numbers have been released by a third party. Remember that before you take them for granted and/or bash Apple.
I for one can't imagine what "proprietary methods" are able to estimate download numbers from Apple's servers.
My systems analysis textbook set me back almost two hundred dollars brand new. My database management book was $120 used. My professor was the author of the latter; he had said he had asked his publisher about eBook editions, and they demurred, because their profits would be cut in half.
The textbook industry needed this swift kick in the nuts to break up the racket.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
http://xkcd.com/865/
forces you to sell only via the Apple Store. So, Apple will make 30% on every text book sold which is written in their new tool, and likey 30% on every new, yearly addition which changes a picture here or there and yet charges full price (what, you don't think this odious practice from physical books will make it into electronic textbooks?)
Talk about vendor lock-in.
And good luck trying to sell your book at the end of the year back to the Apple Store...
....NOT THE STUDENT.
So until the University recommends those e-books, which they won't, it don't mean squat.
Only retards deal with, or interact with Apple in any way.
If you own ANY apple products, or otherwise have a business connection to Apple, you're not as smart as you think you are.
So how does this "iBooks 2" work on non-iOS devices? Android? Linux? MS-Windows?
I have nothing against digital books, but if they are going to be locked up on a single platform, this is not a good thing (especially for educational uses).
I don't really think e-textbooks are all that environmentally friendly. The iDevice you have to own to use it (and upgrade every 6 months because they've convinced you their new version is perfect) is full of dangerous, toxic chemicals.
Great, too bad if you are poor, no more textbooks for you. No iPad no education. There is no merit in this kind of lock in.
Here's a prediction.. 20 years from now Apple won't be remembered for the iMacs or iPods, but for successfully revolutionising education as we know it. If $60-$100 textbooks can be acquired for $15 per book for a digital iPad version, it'll be a no-brainer (for whomever is currently paying for the textbooks) to buy an iPad for any education requiring more than 6-12 textbooks.
They lack... portability? Ok, if you have to carry 5 of them around, I see your point. .... ok, you win.
Durability? Like, when I spill coffee on mine? Or, drop it? Or, draw mustaches on the people in it?
Accessibility?
Consistent quality? So, you're going to GUARANTEE consistent content quality in eBooks?
And, of course, the ebook argument wins on searchability. But let's face it, an Index/TOC is practically just as good. Unless you're searching for absolutely every occurrence of a specific word, a good index is just as good.
But, are we really going to argue that iPads are more environmentally friendly than text books? That would be an interesting discussion.
sig: sauer
That's going to end up disappointing you.
There may be some books. But the prices will make you cry. And you'll realize that their expenses were cut far more than any discount they do give you.
Don't expect this to work out for you. That industry is a siphon.
I'm sorry, little merit?
- Portability: No need for external power to read a book.
- Accessibility: how many people have an ipad vs people who have books worldwide
- Durability: we can review this point once you change devices and DRM stops you from accessing what you've bought.
- Interactivity: really? reading a fucking book isn't interactive enough?
Textbooks cost so much because they have thousands of hours of design and proofing behind them. Will e-textbooks with their range of costs have as much quality control? Or will we see the same range of quality as we see in publish-yourself ebooks? "See, Columbus sailed the Nano, Pinto and Santa Mario to find America in 1482. Says so right here in my etextbook I got for 99 cents."
"Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
For me studying physics every day the e-textbook is still years away from being useful. I can agree with the portability argument but thats about it. I can, with a real, physical textbook have the following advantages over an iTextBook however:
- drop a textbook without breaking it, and even if I damage it I can still use it, not wait for my insurer to maybe replace it because the screen shattered
- flick open at the index and quickly find what I want, and flick back and forth between sticky marked pages, and generally navigate a real book a lot faster
- have several books open on my desk at once - rather a necessity for any scientist
- be sure that the textbook I have bought is decent, well edited, well peer reviewed and correct, because it came from an internationally renowned publisher not "#physicsgeek78695#", as Apple seem to want to make the e-textbook market the same as the Android App Store
- keep a real book if I decide to change my computer manufacturer, phone, name, credit card number etc.
- Be sure that my textbook, while murdering some tree somewhere and not being 100% green and hippy, did not cause several factory workers to jump to their deaths, add to the toll of heavy metal pollution in east asian watercourses, or pad the coffers of Apple in preference to the Authors who sweated over the book. Odds are Apple will take a bigger cut than conventional publishers, because brand power means they can.
Just my $0.02
Book: Grow tree. Create paper. Use for a hundred years or so. Paper rots. Repeat.
iGadget: Mine toxic heavy metals. Make gadget with slave labor that last for a few years. Burn electricity to use gadget. Throw gadget in landfill when done. Repeat.
I think I'll stick with real books, thanks.
I don't respond to AC's.
I just dropped a real book on the ground. I can still read it. Now, somebody please to that with an iGadget and please tell me what happens...
I don't respond to AC's.
Physical textbooks lack:
What Apple has really done is taken a cornered market (students being forced to buy new editions every year) and changed the entity doing the cornering from something students hate (publishers) to something students blindly adore (Apple).
...the '1984' Apple commercial
Now they are going to be telling us what to learn and think.
We were never at war with innovation, we are always at war with innovation.
Coming to you soon on the iBigBrother (with CarrierIQ).
Silence is a state of mime.
If they're anything like me, they downloaded the Author application, played with and saved a test "publication", then tossed the application into the shitcan with all the other applications that save only to proprietary venues/formats.
.pdf, or .txt (the latter without any graphics, of course). And it will not "publish" to anything but Apple's store for use on iPhones and iPads.
.PDF instead. Sure, it will get "illegally shared" some, but as far as I am concerned that is still better than this. And there are ways to help prevent that, too.
Author will save only to ".ibook" (a modified version of ".epub"), a crippled
I have no use for such lock-in, proprietary bullshit. I'll publish my work in a
I'm a bit of an apple fan boy and am all for promoting them but could you please do better than directly quoting verbatim their own promotional material in the summary?
example:
"...there is very little merit to the physical textbook, and the education industry has been waiting for a viable solution like this for some time. Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly"
Seriously, go to apples website and watch their promo video (it actually is pretty cool) You will find that the summary was largely directly lifted. Are you trying to use these as your own words? They are not used in the story so...
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Seems that Apple is not interested in Canada's money. Shame too, we have lots and like to educate our youth.
http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm
"there is very little merit to the physical textbook"
--Pierre de Fermat
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
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Does anyone have documentation for the used format? I know it is almost epub/Html5 but exactly what did apple add, and what do they not support yet?
I can't use apples software due to the insane license deal, but would still like to produce books in this format.
I have a nice little anecdote on that topic.
Being a Version Management fan, I got hold of some Second Edition of a Psych textbook back in the day, when I think the class was up to Fourth Edition. Besides saving the (then cheap!) $90, it in fact was bigger and better! I checked the introductions. Second Edition: "Blah Blah thank you to the 40 people who reviewed this, and my grant". Fourth Edition: "Streamlined with less common content removed for better initial presentation".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Irregardless isn't a word. Bonus points for using it while complaining about writing textbooks.
But I liked the easy homework assignment of putting a cover on my textbook :-(
The education industry has certainly NOT been "waiting for a viable solution like this for some time". The students have, and maybe even some sympathetic teachers, but textbooks are outrageously expensive, even the e-book versions, and somebody is profiting off it all.
A solution to the problem of expensive textbooks exists. There is an entire world of public domain textbooks out there, but all of them are useless when the professor tells you to read p.67-123 from the official textbook for a quiz tomorrow.
But I would even argue that textbooks are an outdated mode of communication. We live in a world of instant reference. Have you ever tried to search an e-book using Ctrl-F? It is absolute hell, because you keywords either occur on every other page, or they don't occur at all in the specific string you are using.
Plus the pages are often bigger, easier to read and you can have more than ONE textbook open at a time, unless you're going to buy mulitple ipads.
And inside of it on one page was a picture of a disk, a back flap, and a scorpion.
So not only is the fanboy drivel not edited out, blatantly moronic statements like this are left in the summary.
What I want to know is if I can resell the digital textbook once I'm done with it like with a paper-based textbook. It's one way to help offset the price of the next textbook I might buy, but knowing Apple probably not.
Paper books do not require batteries.
"Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
Apple textbooks lack portability (can you use them on Android or Windows?), durability (iPads are not drop friendly), accessibility (how many people have iPads? Granted, there are a growing number, but they are usually the elite), environmentally friendly(electronics made of rare metals and other things that are not environmentally friendly. In addition, you have to pick up a new iPad every couple of years because the old one has been made obsolete by Apple.)
It's very attractive in theory, but when I look at the license agreement I'm not sure I can go with it (About iBooks Author->License Agreement). If I use these tools and charge a fee I *have* to distribute the book through Apple. I understand the rationale. Why should the tool be free if I can turn around and distribute it somewhere else? It's only fair for Apple to expect something in return.
On the other hand I'm picturing what would happen if I put a few months work into a text, it becomes popular/useful to others, and then someone asks if other arrangements can be made for distribution (e.g., maybe someone wants to make and sell a regular paper edition). I'm stuck if I ever charged money for it.
Granted, the restriction only exists if you charge a fee. If the text is free "you may distribute the Work by any available means". This part is awesome! Full kudos to Apple for that and for making the agreement relatively simple. But what if I wanted to charge, say, $5 a textbook to help cover costs of its development and maintenance? Nothing substantial, but covering things like hiring a student to do drafting of figures, preparing photos, editing, that sort of thing. This would be publishing on the cheap rather than completely free. Unfortunately once you cross into the "fee" realm at all, you've made a deal for sole distribution with Apple, and it isn't clear whether there is any alternative.
Thus, as much as I like it, I hesitate, because I'm not certain I want to distribute my work for free rather than very cheap compared to the usual textbook. Maybe this is Apple's way to encourage people to write free works. If so, then I applaud their approach. I'm just not sure it is the way I want to go. At least with licenses like the GPL I have the *option* to charge money without having further license complications.
You're probably all thinking I'm a stingy old !#$%!% now :-)
I have to say, I enjoyed the fact that the university I went to had none of these problems because textbooks were included. Before classes started, you went to the bookstore and got all the textbooks you needed for a flat "textbook usage fee" I think it was somewhere around like $15-20 a class. You got the version the professor was using and didn't have to worry about reselling it. About the only drawbacks is you weren't supposed to really deface it (though in reality they really didn't care) and you didn't get to keep the books. However, looking back, I can't say that there was any textbook that would be any too useful if I had it today.
I don't understand why more universities and colleges don't do this. It saves a lot of time and hassle and is much cheaper because the costs of a $100 book are spread across many different departments and years. So books which need updating frequently (law, computers, modern history) could be quickly updated while books which rarely need updating (mathematics, English, some sciences, etc.) weren't which allowed for up to date textbooks when needed.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I have been looking forward to going digital with my library for a long time now. I almost went with Kindle, but the cost of buying a another device always held me back. A free app for reading books on a device I already own, and the convenience of the app store to purchase at? YES PLEASE.
Then I saw the prices. Just skimming a couple classics, I was shocked to see the digital sticker prices consistently 30% HIGHER than a physical copy from Amazon. Sometimes it was even higher than the MSRP of the same book (you know, that price you never pay because everything is always on sale?).
I went from being a fanboy who couldn't wait to line up to take it, to a hater in about 5 minutes. Its not the actual sticker price that bothers me. Its the blatant gouging on something that costs less than ever to distribute, and can't be resold or lent out to a friend/family member easily. I'm not paying more something that actually does less, per my own personal usage scenario.
It doesn't appear that electronic books will be any cheaper, and even if they are now, it won't be long until they are the same cost. At my school, there are some books available on DVD vs. the textbook, and they are the same cost as the dead tree version.
The other thing I like about dead tree books are that they are (with proper care) guaranteed to last my lifetime. I still have books that I bought 15 or 20 years ago, plus plenty that I bought used that approach 50, 60 or 70 years old. But the lifespan of an electronic gadget, especially when you talk about mass-consumption items (phones, ipads, etc) is probably 5 years or so with the best care. Most won't go that long.
Finally, there's nothing stopping publishing companies from pulling the plug on your e-book a few years after you buy it. "Purchase price gives you access to this title for up to two years. After which, the title expires and you must purchase it again." Think it won't happen?
do() || do_not(); // try()
We're moving to eBook only soon. I'm disgusted and appalled by this decision, but, in these drastic economic times, I'm not about to Don Quixote the administrative staff. My children and I enjoy eating, et al.
One of the concerns that I haven't seen addressed yet is how much these books will cost. One of the lesser, paper-based, textbooks we have sells for $84 on Amazon and $75 for the eBook.
Unless you could only resell the book for $10, this is not a reasonable solution. This, of course, precludes the necessity of buying an iPad ~$400-$600US, right?
Shameful.
Before you know it, they'll tell us the most magical (and only) way to use these great books will be online only to save on "storage" costs or some-such.
Blech
Too lazy to sign up for an account. Posting as AC
"Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
I disagree with at least three of those points:
Durability: Have you tried throwing your e-reader around like a frisbee? I bet you dollars to donuts your paper textbook can survive getting run over by a car better than your iBooks2 can.
Consistent Quality: Are we talking about the medium or the content? Most (hardcover) textbooks I have are printed on quality paper. Maybe the poster is only buying cheap pirated books out of China printed on green bible-like paper (ala the official Chinese translation of Harry Potter I saw in the bookstore the other day) The quality of the content... well that has nothing to do with whether it's electronic does it?
Interactivity and Searchability: I yield half the point. Interactivity, embedded videos, and links to online content is great. But the searchability point.... sure you can't do a keyword search on a paper textbook, but that's not really how people use them. When you're looking something in the text half the time you don't *remember* the keyword to search for. Physical textbooks give you the ability to flip through the pages quickly and scan them visually to find what you need. "Page flipping" on e-books SUCK. Electronic bookmarks are annoying, for the same reason (sometimes you mark a page because there's useful information on several pages near it, but it's less convenient to flip around because... well, page flipping sucks!)
Environmentally Friendly: Really? Trading a renewable resource (paper) for silicon, rare earths and plastics is more environmentally friendly? Sure you can make an argument for the hardware environmental costs being offset by savings in transportation / shipping of the textbooks, but you also have to keep in mind the hardware is NOT THAT DURABLE and will have to be replaced every few years (planned obsolescence!). It's not obvious which side wins out without hard numbers.
Don't need batteries or other expensive hardware to read, if you need them to be "interactive" they often include a CD with additional information on it.
While I'm not entirely against ebooks I am for them for one reason and that is I can now pirate my text book instead of paying for it.
Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly.
On the other hand, they're not encumbered by DRM, they don't vaporize after a hundred readings or a year, whichever comes first, they don't demand that you read them with Apple (R) iGlasses and they don't have to be vetted by a gatekeeper (who takes 30%) before being published.
I prefer my knowledge in dead tree form. E-books belong in the children's section.
So the big idea is to use...ebooks to distribute..books? Oh, wait "textbooks". I forgot those are _totally_ not books.
I hope Apple patented this idea, because it sure is earth shattering. I mean who would have thought one could not only distribute books but _textbooks_ electronically. Genius, I tell you! How did Apple develop the brilliant insight to invent this?!
No, seriously. WTF? This is some big idea? I assumed the reason textbooks are still largely physical is because of the scam publishers and schools use to change one or two words and call it a new "edition" every year? What new technology is Apple providing that didn't exist 5 years ago?
I'm about to launch a website that is based around the textbook industry, trading textbooks in particular. It's completely automated, you upload the book you have, upload the books you want and it matches you with another user, it's even intelligent enough to do circular trades. It's going to be very cheap to trade books, you could expect to get your whole semester worth of books for $60 including shipping and everything. We've adopted a price that's so low (which is only charged after we find a trade by the way) per trade that it's still cost effective to make a lop-sided trade (an expensive math book for a moderately expensive literature book will still be a cost-effective trade). We're excited about how much is saved per student and how many pages of paper are saved per year. It's called retextbook.
Physical textbooks do not require an iDevice to read, do not give Apple a significant cut of first-sale profits, and they can be resold. These are clearly the fatal flaws; the Apple zealot who posted the story (who was also the submitter on the iBooks announcement story) somehow overlooked these.
"Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly.""
Portability: I could carry my entire year in my backpack.
Durability: Yea, that little piece of silicon you're holding is just as susceptible to fire, heat, water, OH AND CRASHING. Books aren't crashing. Books don't need an expensive proprietary OS to work, they truly 'just work.'
Accessibility/interactivity/searching: Most books meant for rapid searching/accessibility have both indexes and a table of contents - TWO SEARCH ENGINES! IMAGINE THAT!
Consistent Quality: Books don't need software updates, and aren't prone to getting hacked. Revisions do happen, but they're few and far between because of TRUE quality control.
Environmentally Friendly: They're more environmentally friendly (and trap lots more carbon) than your strip-mined piece of silicon, iridium, cadmium, etc. Takes less energy to manufacture, too!
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
... there is very little merit to the physical textbook, ..... Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly...
Bunch of CRAP. Of the above quoted criticisms the only valid one is the lack of interactivity. I can still read (accessibility) my 40 year old (durable) texts that I transported (portable) as an undergraduate and every time I look up (searchability) Lenz's law in my 1970 edition of Halliday and Resnick I get the same (consistent quality) information and, if I wanted to, I could give my old printed texts to another person (environmentally friendly).
The only significant disadvantage of printed texts for the majority of subject material is the high cost ; that is not a fault of the medium but rather a reflection of the rapacity of the publishers.
submitted by,
Retired old fart who was using computers and writing software before many slashdot folks were born and who recognizes a solution in serach of a problem or gullible customer when he sees it
I can throw a book across the room and it might damage the cover of a hardcover, but it will still work fine. I wouldn't want to try this with an ipad or a kindle. Under reasonable storage conditions, paper will remain readable after magnetic platters have gotten demagnetized and CDs have corroded.
College students eventually figure out that it is completely unnecessary to carry textbooks to class. It does, however, take time, so most go through the same progression: freshmen carry EVERYTHING and need to wear both straps of their backpack. Sophomores lighten the load and can use just one strap. Juniors carry a notebook. Seniors carry beer.
After the whole microsoft office document format snafu, I'm surprised people are embracing this. It's not a crime that Apple is tackling the move from paper textbook to digital, but I think there are some very key factors being overlooked which will come to light only after it's too late to go back. But hey, it's Apple. They won't do anything bad, right?
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
To add one more major benefit of paper textbooks to your (fairly exhaustive) list:
- I can put it on a public bookshelf. Every office I've worked at has had a few bookshelves where people deposit their useful textbooks to share with their coworkers. This would be either impossible or illegal with ebook textbooks.
Would you give a first-grader an iPad? I don't care if it's got a Kevlar cover and bulletproof glass; a first-grader can't be trusted to keep track of a lunchpail, let alone a $600 smart device. They'll lose it, trade it away or steal it from other students. Until at least the High School level, paper books are not going away anytime soon.
Weird: Can't even remember when I've last read printed articles / books. It's all digital these days. To quote Egon Spengler: "Print is dead".
Sorry first post, I have recently made an ebook out of our family history/cook book, I used Sigil and did the job in under a day (just editing/layout the text was already there). Its not hard to do and I am not impressed with a new tool that locks you in to one device, HOWEVER this is not what apple is selling, they are selling marketing, something to get the ebooks off the ground and into schools/uni , it may be worth going with Apple for the marketing.
Look at the app store, lots of things made for the iPhone then made later for other devices, without the app store pushing development there would not be the same amount of apps on other devices. The down side is finding the good apps amongst the crap, but that is the teachers job, he then tells the student what to get.
Its an interesting time, I can see books being re authored with other tools for other platforms if they get popular, afterall apple isn’t getting the intellectual property. (are they?) someone who has read the documentations tell me if I’m wrong and they do get IP I’ll warn others.
Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
I'm not sure what school this guy went to, but we used to have backpacks (portability) when I was in college. The books all lasted really well because I didn't abuse them (durability). I was able to open the cover and read the contents (accessibility). I suppose they all had nice quality paper and printing; but really, how will being an ebook ensure more consistent quality? (consistent quality?). I'm sure some topics would have been more interesting, like Sex Ed, if there were popups that preschool books have, and I'm sure that most of them all had a Table of Contents and/or and Index (interactivity and searchability). Since when were books less environmentally friendly than various metals and other possibly-toxic substances (that are often sent to third-world countries to be discarded)?
What I like about books is they don't need a battery charge to be read and they have wonderful contrast. If you want to make the font bigger, I suggest a magnifying glass or reading glasses.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
As a matter of fact, many schools do use iPads with kindergartners (and younger!) as part of special education. They make great replacements for low tech communication boards. As long as you're monitoring the students (which you really ought to be at that age) and don't let them take the devices home, you don't have much to worry about. It's actually the older kids who you need to worry about... they're clever enough to know how to lie and steal.
Hi, I'm a textbook publisher!*
I make textbooks that sell for up to $150 each, while costing me $3 to $4 each to produce, including shipping.
With Apple's new deal, I can now eliminate the production and shipping costs ($3 to $4 each!) and sell them for up to $14.99 for each copy!
This is exciting for all of us in the textbook industry, as now we feel we will be able to sell many more** copies of our books. Not to mention with Apple's new tools, we will be able to produce content for out textbooks at a much reduced cost***.
Thanks Apple, for revitalizing the ever-sagging textbook production industry!
* No, I'm not really.
** No we don't, if *every* student owned an iPad, we would sell just as many, but at a lower price. Not to mention that iPad DRM is *so easily* overcome...
*** No we won't. Content is our IP, and it costs the same to compile a print version as it does an eBook version.
Is it possible to view the list of textbooks currently on the system (without buying the app)?
Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly."
Portability : I never walked around with textbooks. Used them at the library or rented out for a few weeks and used it at home.
Durability : some 84 copies of the original Guttenberg Bibles still exist. They printed ~150 in the 1450s. I think that settles the question of durability, especially in the light of my experience with home-burned CDs and DVDs.
Accessibility: I guess those e-books will be free to copy, ehm... For books we have a nice, tried and true system, libraries. Also, you can give it to someone / keep it the family.
Consistent quality : just check reviews on Amazon plus if the authors are respectable academics in their fields.
Interactivity : WTF? Yes, you can take notes on margin. You can underline. You don't need animations popping up dozen times per page.
Searchability : Index, Contents. Works like charm.
Not environmentally friendly : see durability point above. Make it once, teach people to respect the knowledge in there and it will last for centuries. 10-50 trees can grow full size during the period. Compare that to landfills with outdated appliances.
As of present, printing is still the best way to preserve information. I don't care for bills and similar crap but knowledge in textbooks is valuable, we should not just dump all that into the "cloud".
Of Course Apple is crowing! But they are not the first to have computer books... I don't really know who did it first, but the XO from OLPC has Apple, Kindle and everybody else in this article beat. And don't forget E-How, etc., either!
So this means that all homework is going away once paper books are gone, as the kids can't be trusted to take the devices home? I know a lot of kids that would be pretty excited to hear that...
I think you're trolling on this one. Being a PhD in particle physics and working at CERN I can claim that I longed for e-Books for years. I have shelves full of physics and math books, but my job makes me travel a lot and it really sucks to prepare a course for students on a plane and discover that you need another book that you didn't really want to lug around for the long haul. At some point I basically looked up scanned copies of every single book I had (so yeah, a bit vague on the legality of it, but at least I did have the paper copies at the office) and could lug around only my laptop with hundreds of books that I could use at any given time.
And with regard to flicking between index and notes and any particular page on the book. Did you even watch the keynote about iBooks 2? That's made trivially easy considering that this is what most people would do. Any place you mark up will be by default added to notes index that you can access from anywhere and switching back and forth between current page and index is also trivial.
Oh and I'm so tired of all the Apple bashing for Foxconn suicides. You have to think of the scale. Foxconn employs ca hundred thousand people. The factories are kind of mini-cities. I'm giving Apple the benefit of the doubt here, but they do claim that taking the average of non-foxconn employees of about the same sample size in the vicinity in China and the employees the statistics are for the employees. They get benefits at the workplace that the average person doesn't AND their suicide rate is actually LOWER than the average for that population. Just a quick google gives that in U.S. the rate is 11 suicides per 100k and 120 suicide attempts per 100k. In China the average is ca 22-23 / 100k. So the Foxconn number is really below the average for China. Also, Apple's one of the first companies to publish the list of suppliers it's using. It's already creating waves on the stock market and they do put a huge concern on environment and publish a decent report on this. I'm not sure your average Android supplier does that...
So stop the bashing just because it's Apple and think about the real things for a while...
- Be sure that my textbook, while murdering some tree somewhere and not being 100% green and hippy, did not cause several factory workers to jump to their deaths, add to the toll of heavy metal pollution in east asian watercourses, or pad the coffers of Apple in preference to the Authors who sweated over the book. Odds are Apple will take a bigger cut than conventional publishers, because brand power means they can.
American college students kill themselves at 4 times the rate of Foxconn employees, who have suicide rate still well below the national average. Chinese students kill themselves at much lower rate than American students. I could be an ass and infer without any logic or basis in fact that the overpriced textbooks are at fault for this extremly high suicide rate in american college kids and spread that idiocy around just like you.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
I can carry an iPad with 200-300 text books loaded on to it.
I wouldn't want to put 200-300 text books into my back pack and try walking anywhere.
I can search through any of the 200-300 text books quickly and easily for any search term.
I wouldn't want to do that manually one book at a time to find all the references in those 200-300 text books.
See you can come up with straw man arguments for either side of this debate.
Personally I much prefer a physical text book; the ability to write notes, place bookmarks;
I'll never say never yet it will be a long time before I stop picking up a physical news paper or textbook.
No thanks Amazon. No thanks Apple.
"Environmentally friendly" is BS. I saw a documentary a few months ago, about the conditions that underage kids live and are forced to work, in Congo and other African countries, to mine needed compounds for the mobile/xPads companies. It's disgusting how big companies continue to ignore that problem, and to lie to customers about where they get their so needed stones...
...For "something completely different": I also like to write some side notes on the books I own. I like to highlight important parts that I will, most likely, be searching for again. Unless you can edit the content of the eBook and are allowed to make notes, highlights and the occasional devil horns and mustache, the whole experience is not yet attainable.
Also there should be a converter from the eBooks you might have already purchased for other platform. I HATE that every time some new gadget/format appears and replaces previous ones, you have to pay the same or even more for the same thing. In relation to vhs/dvd/br I understand because it had to be remastered, digitized, bla, bla, but with something as simple as a book? - There's no justification, it's just pure greed.
I was about to make similar comments. The oldest books in my collection are from 1941 and 1943, and it still work well without recharging. They're considerably older than I am. There are plenty older books still in use, but I don't use anything older because my field (RF engineering) is relatively young. Think about this timescale, Ipad fanboys. Seventy years is not so long. And we haven't even started to talk about eye-strain and LCDs yet...
Did I read that correctly? You seriously think you can get a degree by reading one textbook? It takes a little more than that. Fortunately, your university will have a large building somewhere on campus full of books (you might know the coffee bar). As a student, you can borrow these books, for free. You will find a great many texts, specializing on different parts of your course. Reading some them will greatly enhance your grades.
Last semester, I bought my books for $450 (total) for the 4 classes I was taking. I was able to sell those books back to Amazon for $320. If I had bought those books from Amazon in Kindle format, I'd have gotten nothing back. Had I rented the books, or rented the Kindle versions, I'd have gotten nothing back, and it would have cost me more than the $130 differential I got for my old physical books.
When they can get rid of that differential, then I'll consider eBooks for my classes. Until then, I save money buying the books and selling them back to Amazon.
Deforest. Transportation for logs. Pulp and paper mill. Effluent. Heavy acid tanks for breaking down wood particles. Lime kilns. Styrene fumes. Recycling chemicals for reuse, evaporate waste into air and or dump in river. Burning massive piles of oil-infused wood waste products. Send off pulp to paper mill for further processing. Transportation to paper mill. Continue process.
Apparently /. thinks paper magically appears from trees.
So 90k downloaders -- there are more than 90k ipads out there -- down load iTunesU because it basically got kicked out of the regular itunes store. The vast majority of these are probably people who want the free courseware from MIT Stanford and the million other small universities that have free stuff available. If anything,. it should point out that text book publishing is dying.
Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly.
Really? Books lack durability? Drop your shiny new gadget from 100 feet and I'll drop my book. So which one is lacking durability? Not a fair test? Ok, drop your gadget from desk height onto a classroom floor 3 times and I'll drop my textbook.
Accessibility? As long as you can read the language printed in the book, you can read the book. I have books that are 100 years old. I can still read them. How many different file types out there from 10 or 20 years ago can no longer be read because the software to do so just doesn't exist any more? Hand someone a book. They immediately know how to use it. Hand someone the latest shiny new gadget for reading books.......then hand them the manual on how to use it.
Searchability? Flip to the back of your physical textbook. There's a thing there called an index.
Consistent quality? So digital textbooks will never contain any errors or omissions? Bullshit. Digital textbooks will suffer the same quality problems as physical textbooks.
Not environmentally friendly? I see. So the metal, plastic and silicon gadget that you buy a new one of every couple of years that is used to view the digital textbook is more environmentally friendly than all the textbooks I used in my 4 years of college?
A few problems with your obviously slanted take. . . .
"- be sure that the textbook I have bought is decent, well edited, well peer reviewed and correct"
- Since a student will be told what textbook they need this isn't an issue, you'll be steered towards the correct book when you sign up for the class"
"- keep a real book if I decide to change my computer manufacturer, phone, name, credit card number etc."
- your name and CC number don't matter. If you want an iBooks functionality, they yes, you'll have to use iBooks. Just like if I want MS Project functionality I'll have to use Project despite there being other PM applications.
"did not cause several factory workers to jump to their deaths, add to the toll of heavy metal pollution in east asian watercourses, or pad the coffers of Apple in preference to the Authors who sweated over the book. Odds are Apple will take a bigger cut than conventional publishers, because brand power means they can."
- Apple caused no one to jump to their deaths. It's been widely reported that the case of suicide at the Foxconn plants was below the national average. This was grandstanding media coverage to get page hits and gullible haters easily swallowed and believed it. Does it add to the toll off heavy metal pollution? I guess that specific type of pollution, but you have tradeoffs with deforestation and pollution associated with manufacturing paper and dead tree books. As for padding Apple's coffers, their agency model of pricing is the same or LOWER than Amazon, and if you think big publishing houses are giving you a bigger cut as an author then you are deluded.
If you prefer paper, then great, but some of your arguments show you've bought into the blatant "hate apple" cult that lives on /.
There is a lot more money to be made from the masses of people that find iPad and eBooks "cool" and will spend any amount of money to get them (without spending a single second thinking about the benefits) than a minority of people that are "power users" and want to extract maximum performance from their gear, books, whatever.
Go tell Apple you want some advanced feature because you're a power user and tell you ignore you completely. This happens with Mac OS X, iPhones not allowing multiple apps at once until recently, their photo editing software being dumbed down and people moving to M$ solutions, etc, etc, etc.
I hope that in the near future there will be more companies that focus on power users that will pay more for decent products not targeted at soccer moms and stupid teenagers.
ebook, epub, ibook, pdf, text, apps, websites !
What is needed in this "affair" is a new role more than anything else.
This new role could be described as "personal contracts/licences holder" "account managers for personal contract/licences and login/passwds or certificates"(no contents or copies in there, just references), something like that, several of them of course, and ability to move all your "assets" or "belongings" from one to the other, so that a trust relationship can exist regarding the privacy of these data (and privacy of these data also under strong legal constraints for these organisations).
Then you can have an environment with a clear role separation between these organisations on one side, and editors, on line shops, on line content holders and difusers on the other.
Which then could allow a user to buy an ebook, apps, websites (access to) "for life"(or with some timing guarenteed in a strict legal point of view, but "for life" in spirit), possibility of upgrade if new edition and you feel like it, and that's it.
Enough with these "private bookshelves"(music, video, sito shelves) linked to some device maker, on line shops, "social network", or some other giant !
A bit more developed below :
http://iiscn.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/concepts-economie-numerique-draft/
(and in the "copies_licences" text (2007) linked in the post)
And almost EVERYTHING already there really
And a little cartoon :
http://iiscn.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/vestale-sous-contraintes-exercice-ludique-en-courrier-10/
"Physical textbooks lack portability, durability, accessibility, consistent quality, interactivity and searchability, and they're not environmentally friendly." Poppycock! An e-reader, dropped once will break, unlike a book, making the durability and portability questionable. While the quality of an iPad, may be consistent, so are conventional books. As far as interactivity, a book requires you to physically manipulate a page to get more information, activating parts of your brain associated with learning. An e-reader requires you to stare at a screen that is as easy to ignore as any TV commercial. Searchability? That is called an index. If you don't know how to use one, you won't do much better with keywords. Finally, environmentally friendly? E-readers are made of non-renewable resources that must be mined, causing environmental destruction, toxic byproducts, and greenhouse gasses to power them. Books are made from trees, which unlike rare earth metals are renewable.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so- Zaphod beeblebrox
Hi AC,
I clearly should have added "written on my Mac" to the bottom of that post then.
And don't get me wrong, I own an ebook reader and for some things, scientific papers included I think it's great. Still, having etextbooks just doesn't make up for being able to have multiple books open on my desk, not being tied to a platform, and being able to get books out of the library, a point I initially missed. My university, department, and research group all have great libraries, which could well die a death in the DRM laden ebook world. I can see that eventually pricing a lot of students out of the market. In reach of my desk at the moment I have ~£1500 worth of reference books, just about all from the library. There is no way that is sustainable in the Apple model of the education world, but it could happen if publishers all decide that ebooks are the future.
"As for padding Apple's coffers, their agency model of pricing is the same or LOWER than Amazon, and if you think big publishing houses are giving you a bigger cut as an author then you are deluded." That I can't put figures on but then odds are you can't either. But if you think that any multinational in the modern world, will even think twice about squeezing a captive audience as hard as it can then YOU are deluded. Reel them in with a good deal, then screw them once they are stuck. Happens everywhere, every time.
I will freely admit to having a grandstanding moment wrt to the whole Foxconn plant thing, but I still find the idea of labour camp esque factories abhorrent, and though sadly for the tech I essentially *need* to have, i.e a computer of some kind, mobile phone of some kind, I still do my best to find the least unethical manufacturer I can, (hollow laughter).
-FS-
Haven't you seen StarTrek TNG? They have multiple pads all over the place. Piles of them at times. Everyone needs one iPad for every class.
Learn to love Alaska
Great to see that geeks can finally praise apple for doing something :)
Textbooks last for years, decades even. You can download an eText over and over again, but the device you read it on is hardly as durable.
Textbooks are searchable, they have a table of contents and often times an index. If you know how to use these things it's easy to look stuff up in a textbook. It's also easier to remember where information is if I engage the tactile sensation of touching the page and lifting the weight of those pages, which you don't get on an eText. Having used both it is usually quicker to search on an eText, but a textbook is far superior to look up vaguely remembered information.
I don't even know what they mean by "accessible", I mean you can read can't you?
To me this seems like an attempt to hold down production costs by publishing less, writing less, and replacing text with videos. This is about holding a bottom line while producing a lower quality product.
The upshot is we will see some of the savings passed down to us, and these companies *will* try their best to make the quality as good or better than it ever has been. I just don't think it's possible for them to succeed.