Will Apple’s iPad do to textbooks what the iPod did to music?
As I write this it’s just over a week since Apple announced the longawaited iPad tablet device. The computer press has been abuzz with news of the tablet for many months, pundits weighed in with their opinions long before the official event, and, in some ways, the actual announcement became almost an afterthought. I admit that upon first seeing the iPad on Apple’s website, I was nonplussed. It looked to me like an overgrown iPod Touch, and did not generate the level of personal “gear lust” I had expected. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that the potential impact of a portable, dedicated internet and e-book device began to dawn on me, particularly for education.
PRINT EVOLVES
In some ways the evolution of print mirrors the evolution of recorded music. As music media evolved from tape and records (both in the analog domain) to CDs and digital MP3s (both in the digital domain), the amount and variety of music available increased, while the old channels of distribution withered and new channels emerged. The cassette-based Walkman disappeared, and the MP3 player became ubiquitous.
Today the print industry is in a state of crisis. Newspaper and magazine circulation continues to decline, while alternative print vehicles have emerged. The advent of blogging, social networking, online photo sharing, and other digital manifestations of Web 2.0, has changed the way we consume (and, often, how we create) the printed word. Today we consume print on computer screens, and to some extent on dedicated ebook readers.
Consider Amazon’s Kindle, which, along with Sony’s Reader product, has been plowing the field in the nascent e-book market. Introduced in November 2007, the first shipment of Kindles sold out within five hours, thanks to a successful presale campaign. Business analysts put the total number of Kindles sold somewhere north of 2 million units, while the consensus is that Sony has sold fewer than a million units.
But how many of your students own Kindles? I have yet to find any of mine who do, although my mother-in-law and her friends own them. What does that say? According to research recently conducted at the University of Georgia, Amazon’s Kindle is far less attractive to young people than it is to adults. Younger consumers actually preferred their smart phones to the Kindle, which felt “old” to them.
ITUNES BEATS WALMART
How many of your students own iPods and buy music from the iTunes Store? Your mileage may vary, but for me nearly all of them do. There is a reason why Steve Jobs is probably the most powerful person in the music industry today. The one-two punch of the iPod and the iTunes music store capitalized on the development of digital music, and created an entirely new distribution channel for the recording industry. The iTunes Store is the number one music retailer in the U.S. today.
Apple has clearly targeted textbooks in particular as an area where the iPad can excel. As part of his iPad presentation, Jobs announced an e-reader application called iBooks, along with a bookstore called iBookstore. While I’m getting tired of product and service names prefixed with the letter “i,” the success of the iPod/iTunes combination cannot be denied, and Apple clearly intends to repeat that winning performance. Interestingly, Apple has chosen to implement their e-reader to utilize the ePub format, making the iBookstore and its wares compatible with Sony e-readers but specifically not compatible with Amazon’s Kindle.
The “killer app” for the iPad may very well be textbooks. These have increased markedly in price over the past several years, to the point where the U.S. Government Accounting Office conducted an investigation of the matter in 2005. The GAO found that since 1986, textbook prices have increased at twice the rate of inflation. Textbook publishers explain the soaring prices by pointing out that many textbooks now contain supplemental materials on CD or DVD in response to demands by instructors.
On the other hand, supplemental textbook materials should be no problem for an internet-connected iPad. The same goes for textbook revisions, which could be accomplished as a background task on an iPad. Moreover, the troublesome buy and sell cycle of paper textbooks could be completely eliminated. Textbooks could be leased, with a buyout option that would kick in at the end of the lease period. But the most important benefit of all is that pricing could relate directly to the value of the content, rather than the cost of manufacture and shipping.
Version one of the iPad is not without its faults. It is currently incapable of multitasking, and lacks some of the common connection facilities of a laptop, including USB. But it is priced well below any competent laptop computer, and only marginally more than what an underpowered netbook costs with an internet subscription plan. It’s light and mobile, and we know how today’s students love their mobile devices. For them, portability trumps everything.
Ultimately, the success or failure of the iPad as an educational tool probably rests with students themselves. After all, I was not the one who decided that Facebook would be the primary vehicle for e-mail communications; they did. Will they take to the iPad in the same way they’ve taken to the iPhone and BlackBerry? Only time will tell, but I’m betting that the answer will be yes.
Steve Cunningham is a senior lecturer in technology in the Thornton School, Music Industry Department at USC. He can be reached at voicetalent@mac.com.