The Wall Street Journal is reporting that major publishers have approached ScrollMotion to adapt their textbooks for use on the Apple iPad.
You may have seen ScrollMotion’s existing e-books in the App Store: the company takes existing books provided by publishers and adapts them so they look good on the iPhone or iPod Touch’s smaller screen, then enhances them with built-in search, indexes, dictionaries and interactive flourishes.
Not very surprising that a company devoted to translating e-books to a format that takes advantage of the iPhone’s innate capabilities would be looking to do the same thing for the iPad. But according to the Journal, ScrollMotion has a long list of big-name textbook publishers already lined up,including McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Perason Education and Kaplan.
This development makes apparent the huge advantage the iPad has over the likes of the Kindle DX in the college textbook market: not only is the iPad a fantastic student tool in its own right for things like note taking and playing around with study-specific apps, but its textbooks can be truly interactive in a way Amazon’s currently can not.
That’s a revolutionary leap forward in the way students learnt… and the iPad is priced cheap enough that almost any student can afford to own one.
The only question is whether or not e-textbooks will cost less than their exorbitant physical counterparts. The textbook market is a total scam already, only remotely manageable for most students because of the vibrant second-hand market (and the on-the-sly photocopying of kind hearted but copyright violating professors). If e-textbook publishers don’t lower their prices, the average student will probably blanch at the idea of paying $100+ for an e-textbook on top of the $499 price of the iPad required to access it.
The iPad is a fantastic tool that academia should embrace… but whether e-textbooks on the platform will take off or not has a lot to do, I think, with whether or not the industry can bring themselves to drop textbook prices. It’s basic economics: resale-ability increases the value of finite goods. If infinite goods like e-textbooks don’t cost a good chunk less than their finite, resell-able counterparts, the textbook industry is going to have a struggle on their hands convincing penny-pinched college students to buy their e-books… even if they already want or own an iPad…
… although, as my girlfriend just noted to me, the premium paid for an iPad may well be worth it for students already dealing with the lower lumbar issues associated with hauling around thirty bounds of moribund tree with them to every class.
