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Comment by maercsrats | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably going to get downvoted for this but I'll say it anyway: there isn't a tablet market, there is only an ipad market. Apple want to make it easier to make books for ipads because: 1. that's what they sell and 2. that's what people are buying.

A quick aside, my mom is a 7th grade reading/writing teacher in a small (around 18K in the county) west-TN town. Her little school has an ipad cart. Every student does their writing (typing really) on an ipad. Both kids and teachers love it. The news today will probably thrill all of them.

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Who cares though. That's like arguing over which paper stock is the most prevalent in the market today and then putting the manufacturer of that paper stock in the driver's seat of the publishing industry.

The iPad rules now.. but maybe net-books will make a miraculous comeback soon. Or maybe some other kind of device will take over.. flexible digital displays? Is there anything sooo complex about a textbook (even a digitally super-duper fancy one) that really can't be done on a platform that will adapt to any device? (aka the internet)

I would have been more inclined to agree until the Kindle Fire came out. That is starting to change things.

I don't have a Kindle Fire, but I imagine it isn't very useful for textbooks. Thinking back to my school days, textbooks were huge and closer to the size of an iPad than to a Fire. The Fire's screen is great for blocks of text, but it's way too small to clearly display charts and tables.

In landscape mode it should be able to fit a decent sized chart or table on screen.

Next to the relevant text section, as with a paper textbook?

No, but that would be tough on the current iPad as well, given the relatively low resolution compared to printed books.

I really don't think a chart/video next to some explanatory text would tax an iPad screen. News websites often use a similar layout and work fine.

>there isn't a tablet market, there is only an ipad market.

There is certainly a laptop market. It would make sense to make the books compatible with the devices students already have.

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