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Apple wants to do e-textbooks
Apple's announced it's going to reinvent textbooks by turning them into multimedia extravaganzas that only work on an iPad. Setting aside, for the moment, the idea of textbooks only for those students whose families can afford a $400-600 device to read them (and the risk of sending said device to school with a teenager), and that the Terms of Use may not work for minors, who can't enter legally binding agreements. Assume we're living in Perfect Apple-land, where everyone can afford an iPad for every child and parents happily assume full liability for all actions their kids might commit with unrestricted internet access.
Okay then. On to the textbooks. Apple's big slide on the screen says they'll have
Interactivity out the yazoo.... yeah, I can believe this. It's what all the new sellers are pushing: BOOKS PLUS! Books with blinky things and movies and charts that switch from lines to pies at a click. Why are they offering these things, which take extra coding skills and time and special software arrangements to support? Because they know damn well that textbooks on a screen aren't as compelling as the ones on paper. Because they can't pitch "here are schoolbooks, which you can put on your device." They have to pitch "these are BETTER than the books you can get now." Which they're not. Vids are nice, but we really did managed to produce quite a few intelligent, strong-willed, creative people over the last fewhundred million years without them. Animation and interactive charts don't make for better content; the history of digitization shows they mostly work to disguise a lack of substance. (I'm all for a textbook about "modern activism" with video clips of the Occupy movement. I don't, however, think kids will be better off with math textbooks that show apples jumping in and out of barrels, which is what I'm afraid we'll get first.)
About that "fast, fluid navigation"... I doubt it. A lot. So far, there is just *nothing* on a screen that rivals paper for "flip back and forth between sections." Certainly, nothing within one program. (When I have 20 tabs open and need to compare text from three different sites... I open Notepad or Word and paste in sections, because switching between tabs is a nuisance.) Maybe, maybe, if the program allows a "split view" (like that option in Word I accidentally open every now and then and can't figure out how to shut off), it'd work for easy navigation between pages. Other than that, however, all current screen software *sucks* for academic work. There is no "hold this page open while I check back to Chapter 3 to see if that was the same topic." There is no "flip through pages, one at a time, until I find that chart again." (There's no doubt a search function. I bet it doesn't search for "that chart with the big spike of activity in the middle, with the green line going diagonally across it.")
It may have a flip function; so far, every computer-flip-pages function I've ever seen has been slower than the human eye can parse pages. Pages have to load, and we don't mind a half-second processing time for that--until we want to flip through a hundred of them in a row. There is no current software designed for fast, fluid navigation of ebooks. PDF with a well-designed TOC in the bookmarks comes closest--but that works because the pages are fixed sizes. PDF doesn't allow for resizing the text; eTextbooks would need to allow that because screen resolution is so much worse than print, and because not everyone can read standard-sized print at all.
Highlighting, note-taking... yeah, well, technically Kindles have this now, and it's useless for academic use. Will the notes be exportable & printable? (Hint: Nothing on the iPad is willingly designed to be exportable outside the iOS walled garden; Apple tolerates the need to allow some data exports.) Will they be unlimited? Will they allow use of a stylus or real keyboard, or will notes be limited to what students can do with a touchscreen keyboard? Yes, most students know their way around a screen keyboard these days--but there's a reason nobody writes novels on the iPad. It's okay for a sentence or two of notes; it's awful for whole paragraphs. (Of course, Apple would say you'd use a notebook to actually compose your reports or whatever. But why have a separate computer, just for reading, when instead you could have a netbook or laptop that lets you read *and* write reports?)
Searching and definitions: The new iTextbooks will have features that weren't groundbreaking in Word97.
Lesson reviews and study cards: "Cards?" It will have "Cards?" No, it will have "quarter-screen squares with limited data input allowances." Cards, in my mind, are physical. Lesson Reviews ... quizzes built into the textbooks? Because I'm pretty sure this doesn't mean "the teacher can assign essay questions that can be answered on the iPad and will be delivered to the teacher's master account."
Also: see them carefully not mention the word "accessibility." Which means the books can't be used in US public schools; there's no way to make an iPad work for someone who can't see well enough to navigate its buttons, or someone whose hands aren't steady enough for its tap-click-drag functions.
Buncha bells and whistles to hide the fact that they're NOT talking about the lack of peer-reviewed content. They intend to release the iBooks 2 spec on authors & developers, and tell them to write textbooks loaded with animations, and sell them through the iBookstore for $14.99, of which Apple will take about a third. They're pitching big hype about the "features" of the books, and not discussing the educational content at all.
Okay then. On to the textbooks. Apple's big slide on the screen says they'll have
- Gorgeous, fullscreen books
- Interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos
- Fast, fluid navigation
- Highlighting and note-taking
- Searching and definitions
- Lesson reviews and study cards
Interactivity out the yazoo.... yeah, I can believe this. It's what all the new sellers are pushing: BOOKS PLUS! Books with blinky things and movies and charts that switch from lines to pies at a click. Why are they offering these things, which take extra coding skills and time and special software arrangements to support? Because they know damn well that textbooks on a screen aren't as compelling as the ones on paper. Because they can't pitch "here are schoolbooks, which you can put on your device." They have to pitch "these are BETTER than the books you can get now." Which they're not. Vids are nice, but we really did managed to produce quite a few intelligent, strong-willed, creative people over the last few
About that "fast, fluid navigation"... I doubt it. A lot. So far, there is just *nothing* on a screen that rivals paper for "flip back and forth between sections." Certainly, nothing within one program. (When I have 20 tabs open and need to compare text from three different sites... I open Notepad or Word and paste in sections, because switching between tabs is a nuisance.) Maybe, maybe, if the program allows a "split view" (like that option in Word I accidentally open every now and then and can't figure out how to shut off), it'd work for easy navigation between pages. Other than that, however, all current screen software *sucks* for academic work. There is no "hold this page open while I check back to Chapter 3 to see if that was the same topic." There is no "flip through pages, one at a time, until I find that chart again." (There's no doubt a search function. I bet it doesn't search for "that chart with the big spike of activity in the middle, with the green line going diagonally across it.")
It may have a flip function; so far, every computer-flip-pages function I've ever seen has been slower than the human eye can parse pages. Pages have to load, and we don't mind a half-second processing time for that--until we want to flip through a hundred of them in a row. There is no current software designed for fast, fluid navigation of ebooks. PDF with a well-designed TOC in the bookmarks comes closest--but that works because the pages are fixed sizes. PDF doesn't allow for resizing the text; eTextbooks would need to allow that because screen resolution is so much worse than print, and because not everyone can read standard-sized print at all.
Highlighting, note-taking... yeah, well, technically Kindles have this now, and it's useless for academic use. Will the notes be exportable & printable? (Hint: Nothing on the iPad is willingly designed to be exportable outside the iOS walled garden; Apple tolerates the need to allow some data exports.) Will they be unlimited? Will they allow use of a stylus or real keyboard, or will notes be limited to what students can do with a touchscreen keyboard? Yes, most students know their way around a screen keyboard these days--but there's a reason nobody writes novels on the iPad. It's okay for a sentence or two of notes; it's awful for whole paragraphs. (Of course, Apple would say you'd use a notebook to actually compose your reports or whatever. But why have a separate computer, just for reading, when instead you could have a netbook or laptop that lets you read *and* write reports?)
Searching and definitions: The new iTextbooks will have features that weren't groundbreaking in Word97.
Lesson reviews and study cards: "Cards?" It will have "Cards?" No, it will have "quarter-screen squares with limited data input allowances." Cards, in my mind, are physical. Lesson Reviews ... quizzes built into the textbooks? Because I'm pretty sure this doesn't mean "the teacher can assign essay questions that can be answered on the iPad and will be delivered to the teacher's master account."
Also: see them carefully not mention the word "accessibility." Which means the books can't be used in US public schools; there's no way to make an iPad work for someone who can't see well enough to navigate its buttons, or someone whose hands aren't steady enough for its tap-click-drag functions.
Buncha bells and whistles to hide the fact that they're NOT talking about the lack of peer-reviewed content. They intend to release the iBooks 2 spec on authors & developers, and tell them to write textbooks loaded with animations, and sell them through the iBookstore for $14.99, of which Apple will take about a third. They're pitching big hype about the "features" of the books, and not discussing the educational content at all.