Ahead of Thursday’s NYC education event, Ars Technica reports via a leak source that Apple plans to announce a simpler way for authors to create and publishe e-books as well as iBook’s adoption of the ePub3 standard.
The WSJ also names publisher McGraw-Hill as a project partner. All these developments suggest Apple’s gearing up to bring textbooks to the iPad but we’ll have to wait until Thursday to see. [Electronista]
DarthDVD
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 8:52 PMYAY!!! now your expensive collection of text books for uni that you was going to sell is now… useless. and you now need a costly ipad to read the new ones!!!
Zeruel
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 9:17 PMCouldn’t do homework. Thieves stole textbooks.
Ozoneocean
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 9:18 PMWell the wight would be kept down and it’d be faster to look stuff up, but harder to cross reference stuff- have lots of books open at the same time, so you can look at pages simultaneously etc.
Also, I genuinely pity kids who will all new HAVE to deal with and be indoctrinated by the dross that is itunes.
Ozoneocean
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 9:24 PMOh goodness, spelling and grammar. I really wish we could fix that sort of thing here :(
Brianna
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 10:40 PMMost good publishing companies already have online based text books. There are many benefits of having a solid textbook over a digital version though.
Jambon
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 7:53 AMNow that all the record stores are gone and the magic of decent audio has been ibanished… Thank you Cupertino… No really… thanks.
moggyx
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 8:35 AMGreat…. except if you cannot take notes in the textbook and even if you can, typing on a tablet sucks.
They are consumption only devices, sure they save weight but most kids and adults can use that extra exercise carrying them.
Cam
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:40 AMI have been using digital texts for uni for a couple of years on my iPad.i make notes, annotate, reference and cross reference with ease. I don’t find typing on it to suck but I often use the stylus and just “write” my notes on the fly. Honestly, the weight of my texts was ridiculous. Try carrying three huge math and science texts around,it isn’t fun. I’d like to see more eTexts available, so bring on the announcement.
Link
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 4:17 PMHA maths and science books LOL! try carrying law books thats tough. like 2000 pages thick min. plus law case notes etc = perm back damage. But it is much easier in terms of studying to have books vs tablet. i have an ipad and i was helpful for my finance side of my degree when doing financial analysis of companies and looking at the PDF annual reports.
cleverclogs
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 10:44 AMOh gosh this would be hideous. I’m sorry but how do you have multiple books open on different pages spread over a desk/bed that you can easily look at quickly…. I think kids who think screen-based reading is the best-thing-since-sliced-bread and ‘the’ way to do it are very very mistaken.
Sigh.
TJ
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 11:55 AMI don’t know what you guys are complaining about, this is awesome! If youre having trouble typing on your iPad try placing two fingers in the middle of the keyboard and swiping apart. Separates your keyboard and lets you type quickly with your thumbs :)
Naha
Wednesday, January 18, 2012 at 6:24 PMWouldnt surprise me that all negative commenters are “old” this is what young people want nowadays and if it makes learning more fun then bring it on i say!