Apple to Transform Textbook Publishing

A textbook on Apple's ibooks 2 application

Apple continues to transform education, now taking aim at the broken educational textbook industry. The creation, publishing, approval process, and distribution of educational textbooks for elementary, secondary, and university education have been ripe for a customer revolution for over 20 years. On-demand printing and the Internet both helped to accelerate the process. Visionary undertakings like Nature Education’s Scitable offering (high quality free life sciences’ learning materials) have also helped to pave the way. But it took Steve Jobs’ vision of transforming educational publishing to make this a reality.

What Apple has done is 1) to make it easy for students and teachers to access high-quality interactive learning materials for free from Apple U (via iTunes), 2) to provide tools (ibooks author) that will make it easy for more people to create and to publish high-quality, interactive educational content and 3) to provide a win/win business model that keeps educational publishers in the game by letting them sell electronic textbooks at lower price points (e.g., $14.99) to a much larger number of students worldwide.

Apple is spawning a huge, vibrant ecosystem of incumbents and new players (including students and teachers) that will thrive around students’ outcomes: successfully mastering new concepts and skills.

Comments

[Patty Seybold]

Oh No! Apple really blew it!

Ed Bott at ZDNet provides insight into the iBook license. Bottom line: Unless you want to distribute your textbook or other courseware for free, you have to give Apple and EXCLUSIVE right to that work WITHOUT any ASSURANCE that Apple will let you publish it!

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/apples-mind-bogglingly-greedy-and-evil-license-agreement/4360?tag=nl.e539

Ed Bott's Summary: "Over the years, I have read hundreds of license agreements, looking for little gotchas and clear descriptions of rights. But I have never, ever seen a legal document like the one Apple has attached to its new iBooks Author program."

One of Patty's Pioneers commented:

"The nightmare scenario under this agreement? You create a great work of staggering literary genius that you think you can sell for 5 or 10 bucks per copy. You craft it carefully in iBooks Author. You submit it to Apple. They reject it.

Under this license agreement, you are out of luck. They won’t sell it, and you can’t legally sell it elsewhere. You can give it away, but you can’t sell it."