I am not a fan of textbooks. They’re dull and boring. They’re heavy. They just don’t make learning fun. I would rather turn to the Internet to find video or images that would help me understand the material. That may just change, as Apple announced a deal with several publishers Thursday that will bring special digitized versions of textbooks to the iPad.
Immediately after the announcement, Apple updated the iBooks store by adding content from major textbook publishers McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson Education. The content is available for $15 or less, which is a steal if you think about how much students pay for physical textbooks every semester. Even better — the editions of the iPad textbooks will be updated for free.
The textbooks on the iPad enable students to do tasks not possible in a physical textbook. For instance, if you hold the iPad horizontally, the layout of the text book shifts to surround traditional text with interactive images and media. As an added bonus, diligent students can highlight text and place notes next to passages of their choice. The textbooks also take care of review by allowing students to create flashcards and take practice quizzes. These textbooks also integrate well with iTunes U, which already provides certain schools (including our own) with lectures and other course documents.
As a visual learner, this excites me. I use the Internet to supplement material in my textbooks, and now I can have that content in the textbook itself. I also love the possibility of having all my course books available at once (a backpack is only so big, you know). However, the price of an iPad is too expensive to justify a purchase. Maybe I’d be on board if Apple offered an education discount on the devices, but as it stands right now the iPad is too costly for a student like me, who hasn’t eaten a meal outside the cafeteria since the semester started.
As we know, many of the professors here have textbooks and publications of their own. With iBooks Author, a free app on the Mac App Store, professors (or their TAs) can easily convert their work into this new format. Unfortunately, many of the professors here aren’t so willing to upgrade, as we’ve seen with their reluctance to switch to Sakai.
Would you take advantage of Apple’s textbook upgrade? Comment below to share your thoughts.
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