Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing

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

by nicwest • 15 years ago

68 62 15 years ago

SODaniel• 15 years ago

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)

dudurocha• 15 years ago

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.

skbohra123• 15 years ago

Probably because the content in the book is worth the cost, not the medium.

ColdAsIce3• 15 years ago

"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.

electromagnetic2• 15 years ago

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.

sigzero• 15 years ago

There are a lot of good books that took time that are in the $40 range. Education is a niche market with a captive audience. That is why they are expensive.

tmh88j• 15 years ago

I do agree that text books containing quality material are worth their price, however, the quality of some books isn't there yet they still move plenty off the shelves.

In the software industry the best software for a specific function is generaly the most widely used(microsoft office for example). Who doesn't want the best performance and best features? From my college experience, this is not the case for the world of texbooks. I took 4 calculus classes and had to purchase 3 different calculus books, all of which contained the same material. Entry level calculus hasn't changed, so why does a book need to be updated every year? If someone wrote a book that provided excellent explanations there would be no need to update it yearly and it would be so widely there would be no need to make "revisions" just to sell more copies.

That's why we don't need revisions every couple years for the majority of books. Cutting edge technology books are one thing, but unless history is changing there's no need to write new editions of a 16th century European history book every year.

Turing_Machine• 15 years ago

"Because writing good books takes time, a lot of time."

You might be surprised at how little of that $80 textbook price goes to the author (maybe 15% if you're very lucky).

Given that an advanced text is unlikely to sell like Stephen King, it's not a reliable road to riches (although you can do reasonably well if you write a widely-adopted book, say one used for large freshman classes -- but even there the publisher is going to be sucking up 85% of the money).

The situation is even worse with scholarly journals. For many of those, the scholars write and edit all the material for free -- then the publisher charges the scholarly community a thousand bucks a year or more for the material they've developed, often at public expense.

metatronscube• 15 years ago

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

nicwest• 15 years ago

how so?

Kliment• 15 years ago

You might want to look at http://www.edutopia.org/textbook-publishing-controversy for a good summary of what's wrong with that particular industry.

joshontheweb• 15 years ago

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.

mrich3• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

mrich3• 15 years ago

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.

tjogin2• 15 years ago

The 30% cut Apple takes is a minuscule part of their business, you can pretty much round it off as irrelevant. Look at any of their financial reports for this presented in black and white. From their perspective that cut is just a way to not lose money on their digital deliverables.

For Apple, it's all about the hardware. Their business is stupid simple to understand, and yet analysts and laymen alike confuse the hell out of it. Their software, services, and their ecosystem are only important in so far as it helps them sell more hardware.

mrich3• 15 years ago

But that is irrelevant to the person who has to pay this added middleman.

noelwelsh3• 15 years ago

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.

Maro• 15 years ago

I really like your train of thought. I only disagree with "Most technical books don't really need editors". I've never written a book myself, but I'd imagine a good editor can greatly improve your writing.

kabdib• 15 years ago

Indeed. I thought I was a good writer, one of the rare software types who enjoyed writing tons of documentation in addition to code.

About five years ago I got a good editor and realized how miserable my output was without one. This person took my stuff and made it focused, consistent and fun to read.

jfruh• 15 years ago

Most technical books don't really need editors.

Um, no? Knowledgable editors make any sort of writing easier to read and use -- especially crucial if you're talking about textbook-style material, which is specifically about someone with subject matter knowledge communicating with people who don't (yet) have that knowledge. They also serve as a useful backstop of fact-checking and just plain "does this make sense?" checking.

mikehuffman• 15 years ago

I would say that very technical books need editors more than very non-technical books. Most technical books are for learning, reference, or both. Therefore, tiny mistakes in technical books can cost the reader in very real terms, whereas an incorrect pronoun in the new twilight book still gets the same idea across.

noelwelsh3• 15 years ago

Most of the freely available technical books I'm familiar with (programming, machine learning, and maths) don't appear to have had an editor and don't seem to suffer from it. Perhaps it's because the people who write them (mostly academics) typically write a heck of a lot. I agree editors are useful but I don't think they're essential. If an author felt they needed one, they could be hired without going through a publishing house as an intermediary. Either way I don't think this point significantly alters my argument.

khafra• 15 years ago

> The only thing e-book readers have going for them is e-ink

E-book readers also have a sub-$100 price point. And e-ink includes readability in direct sunlight, high resolution, and eternal life for batteries.

noelwelsh3• 15 years ago

I agree e-ink has advantages over LCD screens, but I don't think those advantages are enough to sustain the e-book reader market. I think tablets are becoming mainstream (they've "crossed the chasm") and I think to most people a tablet is an acceptable substitute.

rplnt• 15 years ago

And your eyes won't bleed after hours of reading.

saturdaysaint3• 15 years ago

Cheap e-ink devices will probably have their place, but tablets are quickly becoming more capable and cheaper. As they get under $300 and handle almost all of a student's computing needs, it will be hard to justify the savings of a vastly less capable e-ink device (at least in countries that can afford a $300 per student purchase).

Multimedia adds very little to your average Kindle book, but videos and interactive content add huge value to a textbook. Once you add the fact that a student can accomplish coursework and quickly make schools paperless, I think it's a huge value add.

ignoreme• 15 years ago

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.

tel2• 15 years ago

This.

I own an iPad and a kindle and use the kindle far, far more often because of its non-backlit screen. This argument has absolutely nothing to do with resolution, it's just far easier to read an eink screen for long periods of time.

roc• 15 years ago

> "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.

beloch• 15 years ago

"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!

skizm2• 15 years ago

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.

Tichy• 15 years ago

iTunes as the gatekeeper to information? I think not.

nirvdrum4• 15 years ago

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.

skizm2• 15 years ago

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.

nirvdrum4• 15 years ago

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.

saturdaysaint3• 15 years ago

Your mileage clearly varies, but I'm pretty jealous of the "tablet student". I was pretty organized when I went to college (graduated in 03', for reference), but having textbooks/calendar/binder/to-do lists/word-processor/calculator in one device seems like a huge boon over trudging around with a backpack and needing to organize return trips to my dorm to write papers, pick up books, or any of the aforementioned items if I forgot them. Every trip to campus or return trip home required a massive checklist. In short, I think they can spend a lot more time learning and a lot less time keeping stacks of paper organized.

Also, I would have loved to have multimedia/recorded lectures for certain subjects. I've become an audiobook addict and I definitely would have re-listened to critical lectures if I had the opportunity.

Tyr42• 15 years ago

I know what you are talking about for knowing a book by it's thickness, But also, don't forget about the ability to textually search. I find it invaluable when trying to locate passages, and I really, really miss it when I have a paper book. Also bookmarks are good too.

nirvdrum4• 15 years ago

Funny that you mention that. I forgot to raise that in my initial comment. I find a well-structured index beats free text search handily. I realize ebooks can have indices too, but free text search usually turns up so many false positives (i.e., not what I'm actually looking for) that I can't use it effectively.

ddw• 15 years ago

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• 15 years ago

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

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

saturdaysaint3• 15 years ago

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....

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.

tnicola• 15 years ago

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.

Apple to announce tools, platform to "digitally destroy" textbook publishing

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