

Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing - nicwest
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2012/01/apple-to-announce-tools-platform-to-digitally-destroy-textbook-publishing.ars

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beloch
"MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing
model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained
locked behind high textbook prices."

It's a nice dream, but it probably won't be what will happen. Not at first,
anyways. Text-book publishers will continue to charge what they think the
market will bear. They will completely ignore the fact that the cost of text-
books is often spread over several students and several years via the used
book market. With no used print editions available and perfect reproductions
of texts available for "free", students will turn to piracy in droves. Then
the publishers will blame the platform for encouraging piracy. This might not
happen if publishers recognize that digital editions, if priced cheaply
enough, might still bring in the same amount of revenue since every student is
now forced to buy a new version of the text. I'm not hopeful that this will
happen though.

Many subjects have text-books whose position in the universal cannon is
unchallenged. They're so good, so well respected, or the competition so poor
that practically everyone uses them to teach. Other subjects have no real
cannon text-books because no single text has managed to distinguish itself.
Other subjects are simply obscure or esoteric enough that professors tend to
take a DIY approach to the course text, with wildly varying results. In any
subject without an established canon text, a suite of digital text-book
creation tools could be a great boon to writers. DIY texts that prove good
enough to have broad appeal will face greatly reduced barriers to wider use.
Of course, when you can deliver text-books to profs for the price of an
email's bandwidth, it's going to become very hard to choose good course texts!
Content creation tools are a great thing, but I hope somebody out there is
working on content filtering tools for text-books too!

~~~
skizm
You're right for now but eventually (similar to valve in the video game
industry) someone will champion and perfect digital distribution, market it
well enough, and get enough publishers behind the idea. It will catch on. Most
likely in computer science first and then move on to other sciences. My senior
year computer science capstone class we were all issued 1st edition kindles
with our books preloaded onto them. It was awesome. Granted the books were not
major textbooks (all <50$ range) but it was definitely a step forward. Also no
one had to pay for a thing, just sign a waiver that said if we broke or lost
the kindle we had to pay for it.

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noelwelsh
I been thinking about technical publishing recently, and I don't think the
rumoured tools from Apple go far enough. Let's start by assuming that
publishing houses are essentially dead. Printing is on the way out, and
distribution is handled by other online retailers (Amazon, Apple, etc.) Most
technical books don't really need editors. Layout could still be an issue, I
don't really think it will be -- read-on for why.

My argument:

\- e-book readers are a dead-end. Tablets are going to replace them. The only
thing e-book readers have going for them is e-ink. Tablet screens are going to
be awesome. The 10" Transformer Prime is going to be HD soon. Rumours are the
iPad 3 is going to be 2048x1024. They'll be good enough.

\- e-book formats are essentially stripped down HTML, designed for the low-
powered CPUs found in e-book readers. Tablets web browsers will be on par with
PC browsers soon.

This means there will be no boundaries to formatting content as HTML and
reading it on a tablet. We already have many tools for creating collections of
HTML documents. They're often called blog engines. Non-technical will do just
fine using blogging tools, just like they currently do. More technical people
will use pandoc/asciidoc/whatever, just like they currently do.

Then you have to ask:

\- Why release a book as a monolith? Releasing a chapter at a time greatly
lowers the author's risk. They can start generating revenue straight away, and
find out what the market is really interested in.

And then you have ask:

\- Why even write a book? Why not just produce material, using whatever media
is appropriate, and create a community (and revenue stream) around this,
rather than working towards a some arbitrarily sized collection of words?

So that's where I think technical publishing is going. Smaller units of work,
shorter cycle time, and more responsive to the market place. And not really a
world that needs books, and book creation tools, per se.

~~~
ignoreme
I can't agree that e-ink is a dead end. Perhaps you have never had the
opportunity to spend some serious time to compare reading on an LCD screen to
a e-ink display.

Tablets are great, but as long as they still have LCD (backlit etc.) screens
they can't even be considered an alternative for anyone who actually does any
serious reading. You can also pick up an ebook reader where I'm from for about
1/5th the price of even the most basic tablet.

If anything I think ebook readers are going to become even more popular. As
e-ink or similar technology is refined and becomes even cheaper to produce I
can easily imagine them becoming almost like disposable "throw-away" devices.

Also, in my opinion, your initial logic is incorrect. You talk as if "full-
featured web-browsers like on the PC" is the "end-goal" for future reading
devices. Well, we have always had that -on PC's- and they were the problem,
not the solution. The e-ink display is the "solution" to the eye strain (among
other things) that come with reading on a backlit display. So to suggest that
is the goal seems to be as if we are going backwards.

~~~
roc
> _"I can't agree that e-ink is a dead end"_

I would say that e-ink will stay around for _reading_ , but there are critical
differences between linear reading and textbook use. As far as textbooks are
concerned, I would say that e-ink is a non-starter. The refresh rate is poor,
navigation other than linear page-to-page progression through a single text is
poor, annotation is poor, interactivity is non-existent, etc.

It's not a bad or doomed technology, it just isn't the right tool for this
particular job.

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nirvdrum
I'm glad I went to college when paper books were still prevalent. Some
material was Web-based and that was always the hardest to read and comprehend.
I just can't stare at an illuminated screen for that long (e-ink does help
with this) and I find I engage with the material much more when I can rapidly
flip to it.

That latter point is an odd one for me, but I "know" a book by its thickness.
I recall where stuff is by roughly how far into the book it was. No e-reader
has been able to replicate that.

iPads also have that whole reflective surface thing that annoys me. But
presumably Apple could offer something else in the future that would work
better for people like me.

~~~
skizm
I feel the same way. I still enjoy my books printed for the most part
(textbooks and novels). However, I think this will go away when kids are
raised on digital books. Once 1st graders are issued an ipad (or more likely
lower priced e-reader) with textbooks pre-loaded on it, they will grow up and
never know what it means to '"know" a book by its thickness'. Just a guess,
but I think it is only a matter of time.

~~~
nirvdrum
I think that's the way it's going too, unfortunately. I'd really be interested
to see a measure of student performance after such a transition. Of course,
most studies like that are fraught with confounding variables, so we'll likely
never have a clear picture of that.

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mrich
Apple is using the iPad as a platform to leap into publishing, eager to also
collect the 30% Apple tax in this industry. Smart move, but it will be a sad
day when schools/pupils will have to pay 30% of the price to the device
manufacturer just to get an education.

~~~
objclxt
...right...because currently textbook publishers pass all of their revenue
back on the authors, right? I don't really get your point here.

~~~
mrich
That 30% has to be paid without getting anything in return (bandwidth and
storage only cost a fraction). Textbook publishers on the other hand provide
value (advertising/lectoring...), which still has to be paid for. So prices
will rise. I hope the Fire and especially Android tablets can give Apple a run
for their money and get some competition going.

~~~
pooriaazimi
> That 30% has to be paid without getting anything in return Really?
> Considering Apple will introduce something groundbreaking for textbook
> publishing (I'm a little skeptical about that myself, but just let's assume
> that), is that really 'nothing'? Without them, you'd be stuck with dump,
> hard-to-read, un-zoomable PDFs. With their (imaginary) tools, you'll get
> some incredible, beautiful, multimedia textbooks (imagine CLRS's algorithm
> book, that is full of interactive demos showing various sort algorithms,
> ect. without you having to crawl the internet for a 12 year old JAVA applet
> that sucks). I think it's a good deal. _(BTW, I think 30% is way too much. I
> think Apple should charge around 15% for everything they sell.)_

Also, note that the prices will certainly be less that paper textbooks in a
few years.

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dudurocha
Thats great news. This industry needs disruption. Why do we need textbooks
that costs more than 80 dollars, even in the digital version. And worse, Why
do we need a new edition every couple years?

And for me, as a foreigner student, it's even harder. The cost of the
textbooks gets more expensive with the translation costs.

~~~
ColdAsIce
"Why do we need textbooks that costs more than 80 dollars, even in the digital
version. And worse, Why do we need a new edition every couple years?"

Because writing good books takes time, a lot of time. Just like writing good
software. Do you want to be payed for your software? Your software as a
service? Developing takes time, somebody has to pay.

~~~
electromagnetic
Agreed, the whole ebook wars missed the point that for fiction books only 10%
of the cost of producing a book is the actual printing press, another 10%
might be distribution (but given most publishers had to hire new job positions
for digital distribution, this didn't really go away it just got a name
change).

Textbook printing amounts for between 10% and 30% (depending on things like
glossy paper, number/size of pictures, etc). However, given that many
textbooks come with a CD and often hours of video, it could actually be a very
expensive digital distribution. It's very different serving a 1MB file to
10,000 people than serving a 700+MB file to 10,000 people. One of my wife's
courses came with 4 discs for administrative assistant course, her college
alone had 500 students starting each semester, which means you're looking
above 2gig for a textbook per student. So over 1TB per college.

Granted you can easily buy that sort of bandwidth, but it's that they might
have to buy 1PB of bandwidth for the sum total of a two-week period when
school starts.

I think publishers would likely rather keep their deal with Fedex for bulk
distribution than figure out digital distribution when there's no considerable
cost difference in distribution and people are forced to pay.

~~~
aw3c2
Torrents.

Supply a unique key with each book. Only allow one peer with that key in the
swarm at the same time. Done.

~~~
elemeno
Or far simpler - Akamai

Torrents are great, but most people don't know what they are and won't want to
download a torrent client just to get the supplementary materials for a
textbook. Using Akamai, or other similar services, means they'll just have to
stick their code in and click a link.

~~~
aw3c2
That would cost a lot though. With torrents you have the chance to save some
bucks (at least on bandwidth costs, the deployment/coding might be much more
expensive).

------
tnicola
I am about a month away from launching a site that will easily produce error
free e-pubs all the time, every time and have an editor.
<http://www.pixelpublish.com> if you would like to be informed of beta and the
launch.

I though the same. Textbooks are a no brainer. But aside from user issues that
many have accounted here, there is also an issue of professor/textbook
publisher relationship. Textbooks authors (aka the professors) have extensive
and long lasting contracts with the publishers of textbooks. They did not
start doing this yesterday and 'an app' type of approach will hardly hurt
them. They promise distributions to bookstores, printing, lectoring by people
who know what they are talking about, typesetting (which isn't a small feat
given graphs and figures in textbooks) and other services.

Apple is flailing. They want to get into the e-book market, but they do not
know how. E-bookstore is already a flop and they are not about to issue an app
that will feed Amazon's pockets. That is why I think they are initially
focusing on textbooks, but I am not sure that it will work.

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metatronscube
Anything to shake up the industry, its a scam really at the moment.

~~~
nicwest
how so?

~~~
joshontheweb
They are sold at a very high price and then bought back for change. Then minor
changes are made to the text so they can release a new edition. Once this
happens you can't even sell them back at all. Then all new books must be
bought with no real value being added. All this at the expense of students who
have very little money as it is.

~~~
mayanksinghal
For some reason, even US published books in Indian subcontinent (India,
Pakistan, Srilanka, Nepal etc) are a lot cheaper and give good value for
money. There are some compromises made in terms of paper and print quality,
but I am sure that it is not that big a deterrent for readers.

Is anyone aware why a similar price point is not offered in other parts of the
world?

~~~
pm90
essentially because that is not the "true price" that the publisher wants. The
strategy of low cost editions was only meant to curb the flagrant piracy that
was common in the earlier decades. With the explosion of engineering/technical
schools in India, these publishers no longer wanted to forgo a market that
they had previously thought was minuscule.

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saturdaysaint
Interesting move. I see this as more than an attempt to disrupt publishing -
it's about pushing a new tablet-centric model of education and pushing
Microsoft to the margins. Apple have already been making a hard sell for iPads
in schools - [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-
educ...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/05/technology/apple-woos-educators-
with-trips-to-silicon-valley.html?pagewanted=all).

And anyone can see why - getting into schools is probably the easiest way to
make the iPad practically omnipresent. Especially if they have a lot of key
content (textbooks and apps), education strikes me as an area where one
platform could build an almost intractable lead.

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ddw
Textbooks should be a lot cheaper considering that most of the information in
them is freely available. Authors should be paid fairly for collecting and
making sense of the information, but it's ridiculous how much they cost.

And this shouldn't be an issue: <http://imgur.com/FchrB>

~~~
streptomycin
> And this shouldn't be an issue: <http://imgur.com/FchrB>

Why? Electronic textbooks with DRM will allow for even more nuanced price
discrimination.

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SODaniel
Nothing Apple does will ever surprise me.

Managing to profile the world's single most profitable Top-5 tech company as a
'Peoples movement' is nothing short of genius!

I for one welcome the iDontneedtothinkformyself. (Wild guess that there is a
patent pending)

:)

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Tichy
iTunes as the gatekeeper to information? I think not.

