Recently, it seems like you can’t be on the internet without getting smacked in the face with ebook news. The internet has been up to its armpits in Kindles, Nooks, Readers, Alexes (Alexi?) and now, most fervently, iPads. The biggest thing to realize is that for the most part, only that last one matters… especially in education.
Amazon knows that digital textbooks are coming. Everybody does. It’s simply a matter of time. So Amazon introduced the Kindle DX, a large format Kindle made for displaying a full sheet of paper. They even partnered with six, universities, passing out the DX to students and professors to gather their feedback.
The experiment didn’t go so well. There are tons of reasons why the response was overwhelmingly negative, but it can be summed up in a very brief summary: the Kindle (and by proxy, the E-ink display that powers it) isn’t designed for education.
“So?” I hear you saying. “Neither is the iPad.” And you’re right. If the commercials are to be believed, the only time you’ll use the iPad is sitting at the kitchen table or on the floor propping the thing on your knees. Ignoring the whole LCD vs E-ink screen argument, there are two reasons why what Apple is bringing to the table (desk) has way more potential to drive change than anything else.
1. Software only. I’ve spoken to publishers for one of my own digital content projects and they’ve got their eyes squarely in the software space. Knowing that the rigid, inflexible textbook model is quickly becoming outdated, they’re more interested in how they can expand their content.
2. Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field. The RDF is a well documented phenomenon, influencing millions of consumers that they don’t, in fact, need a device that does everything under the sun but rather that they’ll be happier with a device that does a few things and does them well.
Apple has long been in a crusade against Flash. No Flash on the iPhone haven’t hampered its popularity at all (despite that many consumers had phones that could do Flash long before the iPhone existed; see Symbian) but many people wondered if the iPad would escape as unscathed. The larger format makes is a better fit for watching TV and movies on the go, but to use online content providers like Hulu you need Flash installed.
Consumers may fall weak kneed before the RDF, but nobody is more susceptible to it than corporations. Look at companies like Brightcove: they’re an online content provider that’s built a whole revenue model based off pushing video from Flash to HTML5.
So why does this matter? Why is Apple able to make corporations switch their content delivery strategies like no other? After all, back when mp3 players were in their infancy, Sony tried something similar: they created a line of flash based music players that didn’t support mp3 files, rather pushing their own ATRAC format. We can guess what happened to ATRAC.
That’s where the RDF factors in most heavily. Coming back to books and textbooks, ebooks and tablets have both been around for a long time. Tablets are getting more powerful. Digital textbooks haven’t taken off quite yet on PCs despite growing services from partnerships like CourseSmart. But blog sites are bursting with speculation about how the iPad will transform education thanks to low cost hardware that expands content at a reasonable price.
That makes a lot of sense if you look at Apple’s history: much of their growth in the late 80s and early 90s came from selling Macs directly to schools. They already offer educational institutions the ability to buy iPads in packs of ten. The low price of the hardware (compared to laptops and other experimental educational technologies like Microsoft Surface) coupled with flexible software mean that Apple is uniquely placed to make change within schools.
Now we just wait to see if that happens.
