This isn’t unique to the iPad of course: college bookstores (and, in turn, the colleges that own them) make a ton of money on new and used book sales every year. How can we, as digital content solutions providers, provide incentive to switch to digital content while not putting existing cash cows out of business?
Students give the Kindle DX a mixed bag of reactions again: Darden Business School users overwhelmingly concluded that the DX is bad for academic use, but would recommend it for personal use.
What say you, Kakai?
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 Knowing that the rigid, inflexible textbook model is quickly becoming outdated, they’re more interested in how they can expand their content.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.
Following in California’s footsteps, Ohio is spurring on the switch to digital educational content. Two down, forty eight to go.
I wouldn’t say it’s fair to summarize this as “ereaders fail in college” as much as “Kindle DX fails in college.” The fact is that the Kindle (DX or 2) isn’t made for studying on; just displaying the content correctly doesn’t guarantee success. Until we have devices that are engineered specifically for the education market, we may not see the full benefits of digital content.
Come ooooon DynamicBooks!
CourseSmart is in the same boat as the Kindle with its cross platform e-content distribution model. Overall, this is an excellent move that should give college students more choice when it comes to acquiring their traditionally expensive materials.
Could this be the beginning of the college market taking digital content seriously?
Calibre is really neat. It lets you manage and access your ebook library from anywhere and, as this writer puts it, could offer a compelling reason to switch to digital materials in the classroom. Has anybody tried it?
A great story about a classroom taking charge in the switch over to digital resources. Their pilot program seems to be going well so far, unlike the mixed reviews we’ve heard of Amazon’s Kindle DX in classrooms. Here’s hoping more things like this spring up around the country!
Thanks Alex for the heads up!
Pair this with an open source textbook publisher (ahem, Flat World Knowledge, ahem) and I wonder if you could challenge the traditional textbook publishers, at least on cost.
