
Why Apple Won't Disrupt the Textbook Industry Anytime Soon - johnpaultitlow
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/why_apple_wont_disrupt_the_textbook_industry_anyti.php#.TxhmNqEi7us.hackernews
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bradleyland
Prior to forming my startup, I worked with an educational book publisher (low
level books; K-8) for about 10 years. I continue to meet and consult with
their marketing director/production manager on occasion, because I enjoy their
business so much. I can tell you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the
factors listed in this article will have little to do with whether Apple
disrupts the textbook industry.

The purchasing process in education is unlike any other I've seen. The
evaluative process is run by educators, not technology people. Many in the
process really don't have any clue about what they're buying. They've already
spent millions of dollars on very expensive "closed" systems. Further more,
there aren't a lot of open systems even available. That's not the way
education vendors work. Look at SMART (makers of the SMARTBoard). They have a
lockdown end-to-end on everything from tools to content, they're crazy
expensive, and completely proprietary.

Even with my experience selling to schools & libraries, I couldn't tell you if
Apple will be successful disrupting the textbook industry. School buyers deal
with a large number of stakeholders, and the decisions are made based on
what's hot now. Apple has tremendous awareness, and there are certainly buyers
for whom that will play a factor, but predicting success in the education
market is far from easy.

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Turing_Machine
" but if it really wants its textbook initiative to truly take off, it will
have to develop apps for other platforms"

I don't think so... from some (very) preliminary experiments this morning, the
.iBooks file is just a zip file containing a bunch of XHTML, XML, SVG, and JPG
files (along with a few files I don't yet understand, but not many of those).
There doesn't appear to be any encryption/DRM/other nastiness involved. If
such is used, they must be applying it at the store level. I don't know
whether this is pure ePub 3 or not, but in any case I doubt if it's going to
be hard to convert these to other platforms or develop apps to run them
directly.

If you want to have a look for yourself, use the command line zip rather than
the Archive Utility that runs when you double-click the file in the finder. It
gets confused for some reason.

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Turing_Machine
Also some CSS files. Forgot that one.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Update: the output does validate as ePub, with a couple of exceptions. 1) The
validator doesn't like the MIME type (application/x-ibooks+zip rather than
application/epub+zip). 2) There are some Apple-specific object tags in there.
These appear to be associated with layout flow.

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TomOfTTB
I think his Point #1 & #4 are the main drawbacks. In the consumer market it's
great to have a closed ecosystem where everything just works. But in a school
environment cross platform is a must-have.

The irony is Apple's success with the iPad is the biggest reason for this. I
anticipate a lot of people are going to buy the much cheaper Kindle Fire, find
it isn't sufficient, and then bite the bullet and spring for an iPad. When
they do I suspect a lot of them will donate the fire to their local school.

That's why schools have to be cross platform. Because you never know what is
going to come in the door as a donation. If Samsung shows up wanting to give
each student a free Galaxy Tab you don't want to turn them down.

Also, and this is a little off topic, but as someone who has tested these
devices in a school I've found Apple's adherence to a single form factor to be
a problem. The iPad is too big to be comfortably used for long periods of time
by Elementary level kids. The 7" form factor works a lot better.

