For decades, overpriced textbooks have been a pain for all college students.
Aside from the ridiculous retail markups placed upon these required books, publishers feel the need to release a new edition every year, which not only raises the book’s price but destroys all resell value, hitting students where it hurts — their wallets.
Apple is looking to change this seemingly never-ending trend by revolutionizing the textbooks market the way it did with the music industry not even a decade ago.
Announced and released last Thursday, Apple plans to “reinvent the textbook” with iBooks 2 for iPad.
Apple’s new service will be a free app allowing students to download digital, interactive versions of the same bland textbooks used in class.
Students already familiar with iPad, iPhone, and other iDevices will immediately connect with iBooks’ easy-to-use interface.
My anti-Apple views aside, iOS has a smooth and easy-to-use interface, and iBooks takes full advantage of it.
Aside from the obvious text, these new “eTextbooks” will feature interactive graphs and charts as well as movies at the tap of the screen. All graphs and images can be swiped or pinched and zoomed, similar to other apps on Apple devices.
The real kicker, however, comes with the price of the books — $14.99 or less.
Yes, you read that correctly. Apple is promising full, interactive eTextbooks for less than $15 per book.
Of course, that’s after spending $499+ on an iPad.
Apple’s overall goal is to “digitally destroy” traditional textbooks with this new service. While many features seem cool and futuristic, realistically iBooks 2 will fall flat on its face.
Quite literally, the biggest problem with iBooks is the size of the books.
Apple showed off many different types of eTextbooks at its iBooks announcement last week. Among those were books like “Life on Earth” and Pearson’s Biology — the latter should sound familiar to most University students.
While the heavily-demoed “Life on Earth” weighed in at only 957MB, it only included two chapters of the books. Pearson’s Biology required 2.7GB of storage data.
As of right now, iPads come in sizes of 16, 32 and 64GB. Most people opt for the cheaper 16GB model — not many textbooks can be stored on that if you plan to put any music or video on the device.
Another problem already existing in the world of eReaders is readability.
Many people say reading on an iPad or any other kind of LCD-screen device leads to eyestrain and headaches after extended reading. Therefore, devices like the Amazon Kindle and its eInk option are more popular for extended reading.
For students who have this problem, reading an eTextbook via iPad doesn’t seem very pleasant.
Finally comes the general distraction an iPad would cause in class.
While this would apply more to middle and high school students, many teachers at the University ban the use of electronic devices in class due to some people using them for activities other than school work.
Students could easily click out of their current book and play Angry Birds on their iPad while in class.
Apple has big ambitions for its iBooks update, and the switch to digital books could be revolutionary. Unfortunately, the house Steve Jobs built won’t change the textbook industry the way it did music in the previous decade — at least not yet.
The low price of eBooks, as well as the ability to constantly update these textbooks online, seems like a great idea, but at this point in time the world isn’t ready to go fully digital on learning yet.
Would I love to see a tablet device replace textbooks, in-class quizzes and those God-awful clickers in the classroom? You bet.
But for now, people should stick to downloading free PDF versions of their textbooks online and read them on their laptops or eReaders — it’s a much cheaper and less eye-straining alternative.
 
—-
Contact Adam Arinder at [email protected]