Ask people in educational publication aboutApple ’s foray into e - textbooks , and you ’ll hear a logical subject matter : It ’s good for all of us — and good luck to Apple .
It ’s good for eastward - schoolbook in world-wide because “ Every meter Apple enters a market , that market dumbfound tending , ” as Dan Rosensweig , CEO of text - rental firmChegg , lay it . Widespread accessibility of e - textbooks on the iPad could aid alert a lot of students , teachers , and parent who did n’t know otherwise that such things live .
“ This democratise production while it centralise statistical distribution , ” Epps said .
The competition: e-textbook from Inkling
But if Apple ’s announcement interest be vitamin E - textbook companies such as Chegg , Kno , orInkling , they ’re not letting on . Those companies mostly target the high teaching market , while Apple seems to be focusing on elementary and high school ( at least at first ) . And the textbook market for K-12 schooltime is very different from its college counterpart .
For one thing , at the college stratum professor can pick and pick out the texts they want to apply . But in K-12 , teachers do n’t have that exemption of choice . They have to employ the texts their State Department and local school board approve . And that approval process — combined with the sometimes cumbersome process of publish in the iBooks ecosystem — could make it a rough-and-tumble for publishers to embrace Apple ’s new platform . ( One publishing company we spoke to said that Apple ’s 30/70 taxation tear with publishers — wonted for magazines and apps — continue in force out for textbooks . )
The rival : e - school text from Inkling
More important , for Apple ’s atomic number 99 - textbooks to win , there require to be a critical quite a little of iPads in K-12 schoolroom — and that is n’t there yet . Apple might boast that 1.1 million iPads are in utilization in K-12 across the nation . But those tab are divide unevenly among the rural area ’s more than 130,000 schools . And while Apple might gas about the low price of its school text , schooltime will still need to bribe all of those iPads — not an easy thing in a clock time of constricted school funding .
“ I have to be machine - agnostical , ” says Bethlam Forsa , executive frailty prexy ofHoughton Mifflin Harcourt , one of the companies highlighted during Thursday ’s jam event as as one of Apple ’s iBooks schoolbook partners .
Chegg CEO Rosensweig say his ship’s company uses HTML5 for its e - textbooks , which allows it to habituate a mixture of authoring tool . HTML5 also suffer a range of multimedia feature , which are then viewable on a form of devices . You ca n’t say the same thing about the iBooks format introduced Thursday , which is confine to the iPad .
“ The majority of gadget out there certainly are n’t iPads , ” he says , “ and we need omnipresence across chopine . ”
