Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It's a nice dream, but it probably won't be what will happen. Not at first, anyways. Text-book publishers will continue to charge what they think the market will bear. They will completely ignore the fact that the cost of text-books is often spread over several students and several years via the used book market. With no used print editions available and perfect reproductions of texts available for "free", students will turn to piracy in droves. Then the publishers will blame the platform for encouraging piracy. This might not happen if publishers recognize that digital editions, if priced cheaply enough, might still bring in the same amount of revenue since every student is now forced to buy a new version of the text. I'm not hopeful that this will happen though.
Many subjects have text-books whose position in the universal cannon is unchallenged. They're so good, so well respected, or the competition so poor that practically everyone uses them to teach. Other subjects have no real cannon text-books because no single text has managed to distinguish itself. Other subjects are simply obscure or esoteric enough that professors tend to take a DIY approach to the course text, with wildly varying results. In any subject without an established canon text, a suite of digital text-book creation tools could be a great boon to writers. DIY texts that prove good enough to have broad appeal will face greatly reduced barriers to wider use. Of course, when you can deliver text-books to profs for the price of an email's bandwidth, it's going to become very hard to choose good course texts! Content creation tools are a great thing, but I hope somebody out there is working on content filtering tools for text-books too!
My argument:
- e-book readers are a dead-end. Tablets are going to replace them. The only thing e-book readers have going for them is e-ink. Tablet screens are going to be awesome. The 10" Transformer Prime is going to be HD soon. Rumours are the iPad 3 is going to be 2048x1024. They'll be good enough.
- e-book formats are essentially stripped down HTML, designed for the low-powered CPUs found in e-book readers. Tablets web browsers will be on par with PC browsers soon.
This means there will be no boundaries to formatting content as HTML and reading it on a tablet. We already have many tools for creating collections of HTML documents. They're often called blog engines. Non-technical will do just fine using blogging tools, just like they currently do. More technical people will use pandoc/asciidoc/whatever, just like they currently do.
Then you have to ask:
- Why release a book as a monolith? Releasing a chapter at a time greatly lowers the author's risk. They can start generating revenue straight away, and find out what the market is really interested in.
And then you have ask:
- Why even write a book? Why not just produce material, using whatever media is appropriate, and create a community (and revenue stream) around this, rather than working towards a some arbitrarily sized collection of words?
So that's where I think technical publishing is going. Smaller units of work, shorter cycle time, and more responsive to the market place. And not really a world that needs books, and book creation tools, per se.
About five years ago I got a good editor and realized how miserable my output was without one. This person took my stuff and made it focused, consistent and fun to read.
Um, no? Knowledgable editors make any sort of writing easier to read and use -- especially crucial if you're talking about textbook-style material, which is specifically about someone with subject matter knowledge communicating with people who don't (yet) have that knowledge. They also serve as a useful backstop of fact-checking and just plain "does this make sense?" checking.
Other online books have had technical editing done by the readers.
Worse, I've read a great deal of math books that were unedited. Arguments end up in the wrong orders, sections are missing, notation changes without notification or regard for readability, numbering fails to match up (not even LaTeX can help if you change your labels midway), figues go missing, indices are wrong, exercises are mislabeled (or accidentally impossible!).
Even with an editorial team there's often a hefty and vital errata for most major textbooks. It's just a lot of organization.
I don't think editors are going anywhere for a long time. The role they serve is crucial. I do totally agree that they don't need to be tied to publishing-as-a-process though.
E-book readers also have a sub-$100 price point. And e-ink includes readability in direct sunlight, high resolution, and eternal life for batteries.
Multimedia adds very little to your average Kindle book, but videos and interactive content add huge value to a textbook. Once you add the fact that a student can accomplish coursework and quickly make schools paperless, I think it's a huge value add.
Tablets are great, but as long as they still have LCD (backlit etc.) screens they can't even be considered an alternative for anyone who actually does any serious reading. You can also pick up an ebook reader where I'm from for about 1/5th the price of even the most basic tablet.
If anything I think ebook readers are going to become even more popular. As e-ink or similar technology is refined and becomes even cheaper to produce I can easily imagine them becoming almost like disposable "throw-away" devices.
Also, in my opinion, your initial logic is incorrect. You talk as if "full-featured web-browsers like on the PC" is the "end-goal" for future reading devices. Well, we have always had that -on PC's- and they were the problem, not the solution. The e-ink display is the "solution" to the eye strain (among other things) that come with reading on a backlit display. So to suggest that is the goal seems to be as if we are going backwards.
I own an iPad and a kindle and use the kindle far, far more often because of its non-backlit screen. This argument has absolutely nothing to do with resolution, it's just far easier to read an eink screen for long periods of time.
I would say that e-ink will stay around for reading, but there are critical differences between linear reading and textbook use. As far as textbooks are concerned, I would say that e-ink is a non-starter. The refresh rate is poor, navigation other than linear page-to-page progression through a single text is poor, annotation is poor, interactivity is non-existent, etc.
It's not a bad or doomed technology, it just isn't the right tool for this particular job.
That latter point is an odd one for me, but I "know" a book by its thickness. I recall where stuff is by roughly how far into the book it was. No e-reader has been able to replicate that.
iPads also have that whole reflective surface thing that annoys me. But presumably Apple could offer something else in the future that would work better for people like me.
Also, I would have loved to have multimedia/recorded lectures for certain subjects. I've become an audiobook addict and I definitely would have re-listened to critical lectures if I had the opportunity.
You mean just like it happened for apps?
Also, note that the prices will certainly be less that paper textbooks in a few years.
For Apple, it's all about the hardware. Their business is stupid simple to understand, and yet analysts and laymen alike confuse the hell out of it. Their software, services, and their ecosystem are only important in so far as it helps them sell more hardware.
And for me, as a foreigner student, it's even harder. The cost of the textbooks gets more expensive with the translation costs.
Because writing good books takes time, a lot of time. Just like writing good software. Do you want to be payed for your software? Your software as a service? Developing takes time, somebody has to pay.
Textbook printing amounts for between 10% and 30% (depending on things like glossy paper, number/size of pictures, etc). However, given that many textbooks come with a CD and often hours of video, it could actually be a very expensive digital distribution. It's very different serving a 1MB file to 10,000 people than serving a 700+MB file to 10,000 people. One of my wife's courses came with 4 discs for administrative assistant course, her college alone had 500 students starting each semester, which means you're looking above 2gig for a textbook per student. So over 1TB per college.
Granted you can easily buy that sort of bandwidth, but it's that they might have to buy 1PB of bandwidth for the sum total of a two-week period when school starts.
I think publishers would likely rather keep their deal with Fedex for bulk distribution than figure out digital distribution when there's no considerable cost difference in distribution and people are forced to pay.
Supply a unique key with each book. Only allow one peer with that key in the swarm at the same time. Done.
Private torrent trackers work with the user having a unique string and the torrent client's announce to the tracker includes that string. If the tracker knows the string, it will a) give the torrent client information about the swarm so the user can download and b) monitor the user's traffic and update the site's account accordingly. If the tracker does not know the string it will reject the user and not tell him about the swarm.
In "meatspace" with non-nerds you would probably supply the user with a preconfigured torrent client which has the ID hardcoded in it (eg give the user an URL to download the client from). Add some nice social gibberish about how nice it would be to share with others for some days/weeks, celebrate each megabyte the user uploads and hope for the best.
A cunning use of a private tracker would be to embed a reader into the client so that non-nerds are more likely to keep opening the client to use their textbooks and simply set the seed rate low at 10kb/s so it doesn't kill peoples bandwidth and get noticed. If you make it readable in part and download in priority (first pages first, obviously), you might only have to seed >0.1% of the estimated bandwidth usage to get everyone with full books.
Actually this would be an amazing way to distribute a game too. If the client is built into the game launcher, simply have the client only download the core and the mandatory tutorial. If someone goes down a certain quest path you prioritize the later portions of the quest before continuing the download of the other quests. You could also prioritize associated quests and follow on quests because you know people will complete them.
Torrents, and the distribution is solved.
Torrents are great, but most people don't know what they are and won't want to download a torrent client just to get the supplementary materials for a textbook. Using Akamai, or other similar services, means they'll just have to stick their code in and click a link.
In the software industry the best software for a specific function is generaly the most widely used(microsoft office for example). Who doesn't want the best performance and best features? From my college experience, this is not the case for the world of texbooks. I took 4 calculus classes and had to purchase 3 different calculus books, all of which contained the same material. Entry level calculus hasn't changed, so why does a book need to be updated every year? If someone wrote a book that provided excellent explanations there would be no need to update it yearly and it would be so widely there would be no need to make "revisions" just to sell more copies.
That's why we don't need revisions every couple years for the majority of books. Cutting edge technology books are one thing, but unless history is changing there's no need to write new editions of a 16th century European history book every year.
Its a last run by publishers to it milk as much as possible before their market dries up from the influence of the digital world, where editions are a wikipedia changesets.
You might be surprised at how little of that $80 textbook price goes to the author (maybe 15% if you're very lucky).
Given that an advanced text is unlikely to sell like Stephen King, it's not a reliable road to riches (although you can do reasonably well if you write a widely-adopted book, say one used for large freshman classes -- but even there the publisher is going to be sucking up 85% of the money).
The situation is even worse with scholarly journals. For many of those, the scholars write and edit all the material for free -- then the publisher charges the scholarly community a thousand bucks a year or more for the material they've developed, often at public expense.
I though the same. Textbooks are a no brainer. But aside from user issues that many have accounted here, there is also an issue of professor/textbook publisher relationship. Textbooks authors (aka the professors) have extensive and long lasting contracts with the publishers of textbooks. They did not start doing this yesterday and 'an app' type of approach will hardly hurt them. They promise distributions to bookstores, printing, lectoring by people who know what they are talking about, typesetting (which isn't a small feat given graphs and figures in textbooks) and other services.
Apple is flailing. They want to get into the e-book market, but they do not know how. E-bookstore is already a flop and they are not about to issue an app that will feed Amazon's pockets. That is why I think they are initially focusing on textbooks, but I am not sure that it will work.
Is anyone aware why a similar price point is not offered in other parts of the world?
Maybe back in the 90's, but nowadays, there is no reason for anyone to sell a book back to a bookstore for 25% of cover value so the bookstore can resell for 75%. You can sell it yourself on half.com or other services and get the 75% yourself.
And anyone can see why - getting into schools is probably the easiest way to make the iPad practically omnipresent. Especially if they have a lot of key content (textbooks and apps), education strikes me as an area where one platform could build an almost intractable lead.
And this shouldn't be an issue: http://imgur.com/FchrB
Why? Electronic textbooks with DRM will allow for even more nuanced price discrimination.
Managing to profile the world's single most profitable Top-5 tech company as a 'Peoples movement' is nothing short of genius!
I for one welcome the iDontneedtothinkformyself. (Wild guess that there is a patent pending)
:)