e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: iBooks Author

  • Apple is Playing the Long Game with iBooks 2 and iTunesU App

    When Apple made the iBooks Author / iBooks2 / iTunesU app announcement on January 19th, there were many arguments for and against their implied educational market strategy. In the educational technology community, two of the most intense arguments why Apple’s move was faulty, or even harmful, came down to the cost and availability of iPads in education. The source of the problems was that Apple made their products wholly dependent on iPad usage.

    • The iPad costs ~$500 or more, making the cost benefits of $15 textbooks almost a moot point – with a higher cost of ownership than even traditional paper textbooks.
    • For real pedagogical benefits, all students in a course or program would need to have an iPad – since most students don’t have these tablets, the only way to solve would be one-to-one school purchases for students.

    There are other arguments to be made against Apple’s strategy, but I want to focus on these two inter-related problems.

    With the disclosure of two remarkable facts and one price break during the new iPad announcement, it is becoming apparent that Apple is playing the long game with their educational strategy, planning to address the problems of cost and availability over time rather than trying to win the argument with today’s numbers. Watch the trends, not the snapshot of today.

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  • Apple and Textbooks, Part 2: Is There a Class In This Text?

    When Apple announced both the release of their iBooks 2 and upgrades to iTunes University, I was curious to see what kind of integration they had between the two. If you do a web search on the subject, you will find plenty of articles that tell you that iBooks textbooks “fully integrate with” iTunes U—but without providing any details. What does that mean?

    From what I can tell, it means that you can put a deep link from iTunes U to a specific page in an iBook. That’s what “fully integrates” means. What it apparently doesn’t mean is the ability to insert iTunes U content directly into the book via an iFrame or some other means. Technically, speaking, it would have been easy for them to do this. The iBook format is essentially EPUB. It’s HTML, CSS, and Javascript. A collection of web pages. They even have explicit support for widgets. It wouldn’t have been hard at all for them to create an iTunes U widget. But they didn’t go there. I think that omission, while not a huge deal in and of itself, is deeply revealing about the limits of Apple’s vision about textbooks and education.

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  • Apple and Textbooks, Part 1: The War on Paper

    Unsurprisingly, there has been a lot of good coverage of the Apple announcements already. I’m partial to Phil Hill’s pre- and post-announcement write-ups here at e-Literate as well as Audrey Watters’ analysis at Hack Education. Nevertheless, I do think there are a few more things that can be said about the announcement.

    From a functional perspective, there really isn’t anything new about the e-textbooks that Apple is touting. Pretty much all of the functionality can be found in one, several, or even all of the entrants in the product category that I have occasionally referred to as “nextbooks,” e.g., Inkling, Kno, MIYO, DynamicBooks, and my own employer’s MindTap product. In fact, as I’ll go into in a later post, Apple’s entrants are missing some features that are critical to this product category. But the facts of the product announcement alone don’t tell the whole story. I don’t think you can really tease out the full impact without understanding the company’s commercial goals—particularly when the company is Apple, which has a history of moving markets in ways that other companies can only dream of. In the next couple of posts, I’m going to tease out what I believe Apple is trying to accomplish for itself, and then use that context to explore where their efforts are likely to have progressive effects on education and where there are gaps or problems.

    Let’s start with Apple’s prime motivation. They want to kill paper.

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