Conserva tive Radical

jacquesofalltrades:

I’m definitely looking forward to the famed apple tablet, whenever it may arrive… especially if it comes with a sweet National Geographic app.

(Via shaneguiter: thatchman1)

Apple Tablet Aiming To Redefine Newspapers, Textbooks and Magazines

My first thought - what’s the point?

My second thought - this could be a cooler Kindle DX, which seems to be facing some barriers to any kind of wide-scale adoption - namely that college students are uncomfortable with using the Kindle as their primary reading device. After reading the article last night, I (without much thought) assumed that this was another victory for old-school text books. I may be wrong about that.

An interesting quote from the Gizmodo piece, from Aaron Horvath (one of the Princeton students testing the device): “[m]uch of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages - not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs. All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”

At first glance, this reads like a defense of the physical book, as Mr. Horvath is listing the elements that make a book unique. Viewed another way, it’s a wish list for a device that entirely depends on physical interaction with the text, but of a different kind. It also reflects a general unwillingness to adopt new ways of interacting with text/technology, a problem that almost every technology company has. Except one. From Gizmodo today:

“A person close to a VP in textbook publishing mentioned to me in July that McGraw Hill and Oberlin Press are working with Apple to move textbooks to iTunes. There was no mention of any more detail than that, but it does link back to a private Apple intern idea competition held on campus, in their Town Hall meeting area in 2008, where the winning presentation selected by executives was one focused on textbook distribution through iTunes. The logic here is that textbooks are sold new at a few hundred dollars, and resold by local stores without any kickbacks to publishers. A DRM’d one-time-use book would not only be attractive because publishers would earn more money, but electronic text books would be able to be sold for a fraction of the cost, cutting out book stores and creating a landslide marketshare shift by means of that huge price differential. (If that device were a tablet, the savings on books could pay for the device, and save students a lot of back pain.)”

Could the Apple tablet square this circle and finally replace physical textbooks with this device? If so, what impact would it have on the academic publishing industry (if you think that it will only be positive, ask the music industry)? How long before we have uniform prices for textbooks? Could this potentially lower the barriers of entry into academic publishing? What impact would this have on self-publishing?