Audrey Watters has many good points in her article about Apple and their potential future in the eTextbook market. She focused primarily on K-12 education, which is an interesting standpoint. Maybe it’s because I went to a poorer school in WV, but the thought of high school digital textbooks has never crossed my mind.
Although I still prefer to buy hard copies of my college books, I understand the market and the reasoning behind college eBooks. They’re lighter, you have everything on one device, etc. I chose not to buy them because I still think they are way too expensive. Sure the initial cost of the eBook is less, but you can never sell an eBook to anyone else. Factoring in the cost that I expect to get for the physical book in return in a semester, eBooks are still way too expensive for me to swallow.
High school eBooks will never fly. Not anytime soon, anyway. As Watters said, not every kid has an iPad. Or parents who can buy them one. Additionally, not every school has the budget for iPads and to pay the $15 per student per year fee. It’s cheaper for them to use physical books and continue to use them for 10+ years. You can find relevant, up-to-date information in the internet for free, so why pay Apple for it? (Plus, let’s face it, it’s not like Apple — and other textbook companies — really need that extra cash they’d be raking in)
Tim Carmody’s piece on reading revolutions was also interesting. I was especially intrigued by one of his last points — that we first learned to read vertically, then horizontally, then vertically again. With eBooks adding videos and movable flashcards and other fancy things that one really doesn’t need, we’re going to relearn how to read again. My guess is that it will just be too scattered an all over the place.
Call me old fashioned. Although I love my iPad, it is by no means a primary educational tool. And to me, it probably never will be.
