

Implications of Apple's education announcement - torontostandard
http://www.torontostandard.com/daily-cable/the-top-three-implications-of-apples-education-announcement/

======
bluedevil2k
To play devil's advocate to these 3 implications:

1) Will all the textbook publishers even buy into this? They didn't give much
indication at their speech (there are more publishers than McGraw Hill), but
it seems hard to imagine they are happy about going from $90/book to $14/book.
What's Apple's cut on these books? 30%? Less? Loss leader to sell iPads?

2) This will widen the gap between rich and poor students. The rich ones who
can afford the iPad will get the purported better education through
interactive books while the poor will be left behind with the old text books.
Don't give me the "well now students can buy an iPad cause books are cheaper"
thing either - kids in high school don't pay anything for books.

3) eBooks are mighty small when compared to other products for Amazon and
Apple. It looks like January 2011 was about $80M. By comparison, Apple's
revenue is over $100B/year and Amazon's is $36B/year.

~~~
freejack
Yeah, I agree. Not an incredibly insightful article. It assumes that there
will be a rush to this new product - Apple is no different than any other
company in this regard - it has to prove its offerings before the market,
especially its new offerings. If its a good product, it may succeed, but I
think its a bit early to predict the death, demise or success of anyone in
this area before we see what consumer and competitor reaction is.

------
gtaylor
I'm always immediately skeptical when people are proclaiming a just-announced
product as a "<insert big competitor> killer".

Let's see how things pan out before proclaiming a new champion.

------
casca
One reason that some textbooks are so expensive is that they can take a lot of
time and effort to produce and they're selling a few 10k of copies, at best.
If you have a professional at the top of their field earning $200k/year,
writing the book might take 6 months. That's a lot of books to sell to justify
the effort.

Will there really be the best text books available for $15 sold only by Apple?
Possibly, but I wouldn't bet that this is end of this.

~~~
jonhendry
"One reason that some textbooks are so expensive is that they can take a lot
of time and effort to produce and they're selling a few 10k of copies, at
best."

That's more the case with college textbooks and specialized subjects.

When you're talking about a US high school textbook, for something like
biology or algebra, it could be hundreds of thousands of copies, maybe
millions, if the book is widely adopted. (In 2011, there will be 14.5 million
students in grades 9-12 in the US).

~~~
Turing_Machine
College textbooks are generally written by professors who already get paid, in
part, for producing scholarly work.

Although textbooks don't get as much respect as original research, any money
at all is more than they get for research articles (i.e., zero).

------
kghose
If some one wanted to they could do the same thing by having a pay-to-use
website implementing an interactive textbook - a lot of students have laptops.

------
tutufan
and perhaps #4: Apple patents basic methods needed to put educational
materials on portable computers, thus keeping both away from the
underprivileged of the world. ?

