01-12-2012, 01:41 AM

Apple education event on calendar for Jan. 19

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01-12-2012, 01:53 AM

Text books... It's to late for me, but save the children!!!! :-)

01-12-2012, 05:37 PM

Originally Posted by _Stormin

Text books... It's to late for me, but save the children!!!! :-)

Lol....I'm planning on going back to school in a couple years so this would be a blessing. I kind of figured Apple would make this move when they announced the iPad. I just wish they would've done it back in 2006-2008.

01-12-2012, 05:43 PM

I'm not sure how much students would appreciate textbooks unless they were considerably cheaper. First off, a used copy of a textbook can be quite a bit cheaper than new (this goes for all disciplines) and secondly, most students I talk to despise reading text on a screen. There's very little a digital copy offers that would take away from the overwhelming preference for hard copies of books. That's my guess - I could be wrong. I am, after all, the guy who thought Apple was crazy when they introduced the iPhone.

01-13-2012, 01:45 AM

Originally Posted by vansmith

I'm not sure how much students would appreciate textbooks unless they were considerably cheaper. First off, a used copy of a textbook can be quite a bit cheaper than new (this goes for all disciplines) and secondly, most students I talk to despise reading text on a screen. There's very little a digital copy offers that would take away from the overwhelming preference for hard copies of books. That's my guess - I could be wrong. I am, after all, the guy who thought Apple was crazy when they introduced the iPhone.

I believe that there are some significant benefits. The ability to search would be extremely useful and perhaps there will be some form of referencing built in if one copied text from the document and put it into Pages for instance. The other benefit I suppose would be ease of access. Particularly important if you have many books (for instance studying law). All your books would be available as long as you have your iPad. Much more convenient than lugging around what would amount to a mini library of books. Still I agree with _Stormin. The pricing would have to be right. Generally stuff sold by Apple is at a premium that would not be attractive to students.

01-13-2012, 11:05 AM

The searching and storage benefits are great (I won't argue that) but most students seem to prefer hard copies. The big issue remains readability and no student I talk to wants to stare at a screen for that long. This doesn't even take into account how easy it is to get distracted.

01-16-2012, 01:56 PM

Been into a lecture hall recently? 90%+ of the students are on a laptop during the entire class anyway. (Mostly some form of Mac)

I think that the iPad is a perfect vehicle for it. Though I worry about the people clamoring for a 7inch tablet. Far to small IMHO to have an entire textbook page.

For a non scientific study I weighed my MacBook Air and iPad together: 4.3 lbs
My Political Psych book (One of the few I didn't sell back): 5.8 lbs


If I have to go back for an MBA (work might make me) I'm going E-Book somehow. :-)

01-16-2012, 02:10 PM

Originally Posted by _Stormin

Been into a lecture hall recently? 90%+ of the students are on a laptop during the entire class anyway. (Mostly some form of Mac)

As someone who teaches university students, yes I have.

The weight issue is only relevant if you need to bring a textbook to class and you generally aren't required to do so. Even in case that you do need the book, 90% of them will want the hard copy. This is why I'm not surprised to see most of my students purchase the course pack I made even though it's comprised of freely accessible journal articles.

01-16-2012, 03:06 PM

All I know is this is a very important day in history...

01-16-2012, 03:21 PM

Been out of school a looooong time, and I am a big proponent of shifting to eText Books.

Having said that, paper text books had one major advantage. They could usually be converted to pizza and beer at the end of he semester.

01-16-2012, 03:30 PM

Maybe it will be a new type of 21st century textbook, with live links, 3D explorable diagrams, graphs that can be filtered and with adjustable variables and citations and references that link to the primary source.