Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Apple & Textbooks
Stoic Joker:
It might be a good idea, but then again, it might not. Its hard to come to a definitave decision on such matters without further research into the implementation and design aspects of the topic of discussion :huh: -Stephen66515 (January 20, 2012, 09:24 PM)
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I don't need further research ... I'm fine with the same snap decision I made after viewing a news cast about one of the Florida schools going to this nonsense.
They decided that buying iPads for all the kids in the school was going to be cheaper than getting dead tree editions of the text books - 'cause electronic copies are free ya know... - And then pass the cost of a replacement on to the parents if/when the kids iPad got lost/stolen/broken. Brilliant right?? ...Not!
Renegade:
And every kid will be charged $15 for every textbook... No more reusing textbooks... So, a $30 text that you'd use for 10 years for 20 classes of students ends up costing $300 instead.
Face it -- math doesn't really change all that much when you're 12 years old...
JavaJones:
The price of text books *is* insane, even used ones, even after you factor in the money you can recoup from reselling used ones back to the store. It's all pretty crazy. But Apple and forcing the purchase of $600+ hardware just to view vendor-proprietary text books is also not a solution. Unfortunately schools are so desperate for a magic bullet they'll try anything now, especially if it's from that darling of educational technology called Apple.
- Oshyan
xtabber:
The real problem with this is that textbooks published through this system can only be sold through Apple's retail distribution system - iTunes or whatever parallel system they set up for the educational market. See here for a discussion of the iBooks EULA.
Big publishers who can afford multiple product lines may like this because it eliminates used textbook reselling and it's efficient for them to pay Apple 30% to handle everything, but it has the potential to really screw small publishers and authors by locking them into Apple and out of the rest of the educational market.
Renegade:
The real problem with this is that textbooks published through this system can only be sold through Apple's retail distribution system - iTunes or whatever parallel system they set up for the educational market. See here for a discussion of the iBooks EULA.
Big publishers who can afford multiple product lines may like this because it eliminates used textbook reselling and it's efficient for them to pay Apple 30% to handle everything, but it has the potential to really screw small publishers and authors by locking them into Apple and out of the rest of the educational market.
-xtabber (January 23, 2012, 08:56 AM)
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They're going to get screwed. They being everyone except Apple.
Ahem...
Such... a... capitally... stupid... idea...
AHEM!
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Does this not ring a bell with anyone? This is what evil looks like.
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