Implications of Apple's education announcement | Hacker News Reader

Implications of Apple's education announcement

torontostandard.com

To play devil's advocate to these 3 implications:

1) Will all the textbook publishers even buy into this? They didn't give much indication at their speech (there are more publishers than McGraw Hill), but it seems hard to imagine they are happy about going from $90/book to $14/book. What's Apple's cut on these books? 30%? Less? Loss leader to sell iPads?

2) This will widen the gap between rich and poor students. The rich ones who can afford the iPad will get the purported better education through interactive books while the poor will be left behind with the old text books. Don't give me the "well now students can buy an iPad cause books are cheaper" thing either - kids in high school don't pay anything for books.

3) eBooks are mighty small when compared to other products for Amazon and Apple. It looks like January 2011 was about $80M. By comparison, Apple's revenue is over $100B/year and Amazon's is $36B/year.

I think we need to wait a bit and let the data come in to support the fact that these books are in fact better.

Yeah, I agree. Not an incredibly insightful article. It assumes that there will be a rush to this new product - Apple is no different than any other company in this regard - it has to prove its offerings before the market, especially its new offerings. If its a good product, it may succeed, but I think its a bit early to predict the death, demise or success of anyone in this area before we see what consumer and competitor reaction is.

1) In US high schools, the students don't generally buy the books, the school does. They often use them for several years in a row. Publishers know this when pricing them. So on one hand, they give up the high price point, but on the other, they (maybe) get an annual stream of revenue. I say maybe because schools could likely buy iPads and load them with books, then lend those out year after year. In fact, that could be hugely economical. If you standardize around a book for 4 years or so, you can literally leave the devices "as-is" and not do OS updates or anything.

The publishers don't really have a choice. If they don't buy in, some upstart publishing house could swoop in and eat their market. Apple has just lowered the barrier to entry significantly.

2) This argument comes up all the time with new technology. The cost isn't going to be a factor forever. The reality is that kids of the future are going to need a computing device to get work done, especially by high school. If the recent trend is a guide, that device is likely to look more like an iPad than a desktop computer. When I was a college freshman 16 years ago), only the rich kids had cell phones. A basic cell phone can be had for a very affordable price now.

3) They're not looking to make money on the books. They're looking to recover costs and take on Amazon. iBooks is a backwater compared to Kindle and Apple has got to know it. The only way to compete is to do something different from what everyone else is doing. This is a classic Apple move. They didn't take on Microsoft in the enterprise with the Mac, they went after the home market which gave them more freedom to operate.

regarding 2... I know that some schools have purchased them for their students along with an insurance plan that covers loss or damage to the device itself. They also were able to filter the ability for the students to install apps and access to the default apps (youtube was removed example).

(There was a story on NPR a while back about it, I can't seem to find it now)

I'm always immediately skeptical when people are proclaiming a just-announced product as a "<insert big competitor> killer".

Let's see how things pan out before proclaiming a new champion.

One reason that some textbooks are so expensive is that they can take a lot of time and effort to produce and they're selling a few 10k of copies, at best. If you have a professional at the top of their field earning $200k/year, writing the book might take 6 months. That's a lot of books to sell to justify the effort.

Will there really be the best text books available for $15 sold only by Apple? Possibly, but I wouldn't bet that this is end of this.

"One reason that some textbooks are so expensive is that they can take a lot of time and effort to produce and they're selling a few 10k of copies, at best."

That's more the case with college textbooks and specialized subjects.

When you're talking about a US high school textbook, for something like biology or algebra, it could be hundreds of thousands of copies, maybe millions, if the book is widely adopted. (In 2011, there will be 14.5 million students in grades 9-12 in the US).

College textbooks are generally written by professors who already get paid, in part, for producing scholarly work.

Although textbooks don't get as much respect as original research, any money at all is more than they get for research articles (i.e., zero).

If some one wanted to they could do the same thing by having a pay-to-use website implementing an interactive textbook - a lot of students have laptops.

and perhaps #4: Apple patents basic methods needed to put educational materials on portable computers, thus keeping both away from the underprivileged of the world. ?

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