Will Apple Dominate The Education Market With iBooks 2?

[george]

Will Apple Dominate the Education Market with iBooks 2?

Apple aims to shake up the lucrative education market with the unveiling of the iBooks 2 e-reader app on Thursday, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

iBooks 2 supports more interactive books with embedded multimedia clips, animation, photos and ...

Full story: http://www.nettechblog.com/will-apple-dominate-education-market-with-ibooks-2/

[voracious]

The technology (although really it's been around for quite a while) is great. The only problem they'll have is the print industry stands to be cut out of the game entirely and they'll be fighting tooth and nail. There's a lot of shenanigans that goes on behind the scenes (at least with textbooks in the USA) so the textbook companies will have their allies. I've seen first hand piles of books that were ordered and never used from the Oakland School District dumped at a book exchange at Travis AFB in California.

Perhaps at the college level it'll take root faster, as some professors already do mini-press work, making their own texts and then having students buy xeroxed copies at the school's copy center.

I'm personaly 100% in favor of it, as it's a much needed evolutionary step for education at this point. Far from the vague benefits of some other schemes, electronic textbooks have real, tangible, and measurable benefits.

Edited January 21, 2012 by voracious

[cdnvic]

As with almost everything else they champion, Apple will lead the world in introduction, but eventually the public will go to a more open platform as the standard.

[endure]

According to The Register the EULA requires that any book produced using their software must be sold through Apple's retail outfit giving Apple a 30% cut.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/01/20/apple_ibooks/

[voracious]

According to The Register the EULA requires that any book produced using their software must be sold through Apple's retail outfit giving Apple a 30% cut.

http://www.theregist...0/apple_ibooks/

...and worse, if apple turns it down for publishing, you cannot use the book to sell via other means. They've made quite a jump asserting they have full control over user generated content in exchange for using their software.

edit: then again someone could just copy/paste the text only portion and reformat it in a diffrent software package. Not such a huge deal, but increases the work. Honestly if I were a college prof. I'd use it.

Edited January 22, 2012 by voracious

[pauljones]

This could be Apples biggest success yet.

[nikster]

I guess the aim is to replace textbooks, period. Apple will go to schools and tell them hey buy our iPads, or require students to buy their own, and our textbooks too. It's in the Jobs bio - Jobs thought that textbooks "suck" and this is Apple's solution.

As for others coming up with competing offerings - good luck. I don't think this will happen until at least a year from now, but more likely 2. Unless MS and Amazon are _already_ working on their own super-digital-textbook authoring software right this moment. Which I think is unlikely. It takes time to write software, particularly if it's going to be any good. And there are so many parts to this solution - the hardware, the software, the publishers, the authors - it's not easy to replicate.

Amazon has got to do something of course, so I imagine they will now either write their own, or team up with MS / Google / Adobe (for the authoring tool) to create a response. Either way it's going to be a while.