AFF's Doublethink

Sandy — January 28, 2010 at 6:11 pm

As a publisher and mom it was instantly obvious to me that this device is perfect for the vast textbook market AND as a spur to more engaging publishing, which is not possible with the Kindle.

My daughter in university has chronic back pain due to the backpacks she lugged through high school, and I can’t tell you what a hallelujah moment yesterday was for me.

But also think about how antiquated the book trade is> Books compete in the same sphere as the internet, but for cost reasons are printed almost exclusively in black and white. They are heavy to ship (how much more than a cd does a hard cover book weigh?), and publishers must take back returns. The whole publishing distribution and business model is a mess that is extremely unfriendly to the creator.

I can’t wait for the creative community to work with this palette.

ech — January 28, 2010 at 6:32 pm

Won’t work – the iPad doesn’t seem to be able to be used by the blind. A pilot program at ASU and other universities was stopped by an ADA lawsuit:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6668651.html

Sonny Bunch — January 28, 2010 at 6:33 pm

I will be very interested to see if this and other devices like it can help revolutionize the archaic college textbook market. Imagine: No more out-of-print books or costly packets, no more shipping costs or printing costs. I’m all for a change like this.

MPH — January 28, 2010 at 6:49 pm

This was one of my first thoughts too, but I doubt that the textbook publishers will buy in to it, since it would potentially be less profitable for them. Not to mention the university run student book stores would be losing out on the action. There’s just too much money to be made in the current system with captive consumers.

Sonny Bunch — January 28, 2010 at 6:53 pm

I imagine the iPad as optional (working around ech’s point), but I could see how making it optional would leave the problem that MPH points out intact: If it’s optional, what would the university run libraries gain. Good points all.

SN — January 28, 2010 at 6:55 pm

@ech

That article is about the Kindle. The iPad supports VoiceOver Apple’s screen reader technology as does the latest iPhone and iPod touch.
http://www.apple.com/ipad/specs/

Martin — January 28, 2010 at 7:08 pm

“Won’t work”

Actually, it will. The iPhone is accessible for the blind and the iPad will be as well:

http://www.apple.com/accessibility/iphone/vision.html

The Kindle is an entirely different beast. Further, that’s only if the device is mandatory for students, which most schools won’t attempt, but that doesn’t stop the students from making paper textbooks a sufficiently small market that schools stop the practice of being the reseller, diverting the holdouts to Amazon.

The publishers will be all over this because it kills the used textbook market which is one of their bigger worries right now. It also kills the very significant overhead of printing and distribution, taking returns on overruns, and so on. If publishers drop prices 25% and get 70% of the lower amount after the Apple Store, they’re still coming out ahead of where they are now.

Universities will likely embrace it because there is a significant administrative overhead to processing textbook orders and the profits gained from the book sales themselves offset that, but just barely. The smaller universities with lower book sales don’t even break even. The bigger ones will resist it a bit more but they typically sell computers out of their bookstores and take a cut off the sale of the iPad itself. University publishers can go directly to Apple and win on both ends.

What’s been proposed is set up so that only the printer loses and the folks that handle all of the book orders from end to end.

San Fran Sam — January 28, 2010 at 8:21 pm

Uh, how do you put notes in the margin of an e-book? How do you highlight the important parts of a chapter?

Sleeping Dog — January 28, 2010 at 10:13 pm

SF Sam: There will be an app for that…

Steve Benfield — January 29, 2010 at 8:47 am

The iPad — and devices like it — will win out in campuses everywhere. My 4th grade daughter lugs around over 25 pounds of backpack — that is not healthy.

And if it doesn’t work for some small percentage of the population — there will be a solution for them. Content can always be delivered in a different medium to accommodate various needs.

Also, the trend is toward personalized learning — meeting the students where they are. The only way to accomplish this is by being able to deliver different content to different students based on their areas of need. It also means that the teachers need a way to manage all of this as well. Anyone who thinks otherwise should invest in a DVD manufacturing company.

Eric — January 29, 2010 at 9:29 am

“…need to lug a laptop all over campus…” What about a netbook? Weighs +- 3 lbs. Are you saying that students in the physical peak of their lives can’t handle that? And they wouldn’t be stuck with a lousy 4:3 aspect ratio from a lousy video card…etc.

Peter J — January 29, 2010 at 9:35 am

At a minimum cost of $500 per unit (and $900 for the version that most people will want), an iPad will cost as much or more than a year’s-worth of print textbooks. The device cannot run multiple programs simultaneously, and thus cannot double as a laptop-substitute, so students will *still* need a computer in addition to the iPad. And of course, they’ll still “need” the smart phone (whether iPhone or other variety) that they currently own and pay at least $200 a year for their network plan. I don’t see how the iPad answers any of the supposed problems in the college textbook market. I think it’s a non-starter.

Matt R — January 29, 2010 at 10:40 am

@Peter J Your assumptions that this will replace a laptop and students will need the most expensive version are both incorrect. Students can have the $800 discounted Macbook and use the $500 iPad. All campuses are covered with WiFi so 3G is not necessary and 16GB amounts to a ton of textbooks.

I remember spending $300+ per quarter on books 5 years ago. If much rather invest in a device that allows full content searching and indexable notes and allows me web access and allows me to always have all my books all the time.

If Apple adds EDU pricing which they likely will and when they offer back to school deals that heavily discount an iPad when you buy a Macbook this will fly off the shelves.

Sonny Bunch — January 29, 2010 at 10:49 am

I think the issue of cost that people are raising is relatively trivial. Like I said, I imagine that Apple — if they’re really interested in establishing a foothold for the iPad on college campuses — will offer campus discounts and package deals with laptops. So let’s say you have the chance to get a $200, 16GB iPad with wi-fi and that offers you the chance to get some certain portion of your textbooks directly on your iPad at a discounted rate (say, 30%). That’s probably $200 of savings a year, at least (depending on what type of books you’re getting, your major, etc).

I think we’re also skipping over one plus from the textbook publisher’s perspective: bringing back out of print books. Think about it…for a negligible amount of money, companies could put entire back catalogs back on the Internet and sell them for $20 a pop, almost all of which would be profit. There are tons of out of print books to choose from, some of which are still in use on campuses today in packet form.

Peter J — January 29, 2010 at 10:56 am

My assumption is that any student contemplating this device (and I fully acknowledge that there will likely be many campuses where the decision is not an individual one, but will instead be mandated) will realize immediately that it *doesn’t* replace their laptop, and that therefore it represents an additional expenditure of not-insignificant proportions. We can quibble about what the price of the device will be to students, but there *will* be a 3-digit price attached. And that’s before a single module of educational content is loaded onto the device. So, whenever a student who is empowered to make this decision on his or her own goes through that process, s/he will necessarily conclude that this device is not a substitute for either of the two devices currently in his / her possession. I’m placing my bets on that decision-making tilting toward a non-sale when the sale isn’t compelled or propped up by an institutional (or parental) subvention.

Brandon — January 29, 2010 at 11:03 am

Several problems with your argument Peter J:

1. Having recently graduated, I can tell you textbooks cost between $100-$300 per course, easily approaching $800 per semester if you’re taking 5 classes.

2. More importantly, textbooks become obsolete as soon as you finish the course, an iPad does not. In an average semester I would pay $800 on books and maybe recoup $200 of it back through buybacks. You can’t tell me a digital system wouldn’t be more efficient than that.

3. The whole iPad vs. notebook vs. smartphone thing is totally irrelevant, not to mention that, of course, the iPad CAN function as a laptop substitute – that’s the whole point

Peter J — January 29, 2010 at 11:26 am

“textbooks become obsolete as soon as you finish the course”

No. Not if they’re any good. And there *are* good ones in every field.

Maria — January 31, 2010 at 4:13 pm

Personally, I would rather have a collection of electronic books in an iPad than conventional textbooks taking up space. But, don’t you think the iPad will kill bookstores (and add more unemployment), just like iPods killed the record stores?