I doubt it will kill the textbook and is unlikely to make them cheaper.
Tipped off by My predictions about the iPad over at Marginal Revolution, I checked out Paul Boutin’s piece, Inkling lets textbook makers embrace the iPad.
This is the claim:
“The book will never die. But the textbook probably will,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis. Inkling is working directly with textbook publishers. First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.
…
The iPad makes it possible to replace static images with interactive puzzles that MacInnis says burn important concepts in to students’ brains better and longer. He showed me a demo learning module that explained the biological concept of cellular mitosis. It starts with a real microscope image of a cell. A caption, simultaneously spoken by a voiceover (They call this karaoke mode. It turns out to help memory better than either text or speech by itself) instructs me to tap the cells nucleus three times to simulate its breakdown. Further steps in the mitosis process require me to pinch, drag or swipe components in the cell after identifying them. When I’m done, I have a memory of having walked through the process physically, rather than just scanning an illustration with my eyes.
Existing texts can be embellished with tooltips, talking text, and interactive quizzes.
But the real breakthrough is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks. (Apple’s cut of book sales is said to be 30 percent.)
We already have computer programs that act as interactive, socialized objects, we call them video games. Today, the production of a video game can cost upwards of tens of millions of dollars and sometimes takes over 5 years to develop. Releasing an A-list title is a massive business undertaking, employing hundreds or thousands of people. Therefore, if they go down this interactive rout, texts are likely to get more expensive, simply because they will cost more to develop. If publishers cannot recover those costs they are unlikely to continue to deliver them. The only way I see this getting practical at prevailing or cheaper prices is for a lot more people to go to college. As for selling just a bundle of a few chapters, I doubt this will save consumers money. Publishers have little incentive to unbundle there books if it leads to lower revenue per book unless it leads to selling many more books. Maybe there will be a few reading lists that skip around between multiple books, but this can’t possibly offset the loss on all the single book classes with lower revenue. I’ve take almost 8 years of tertiary education and I’ve only finished a textbook in a handful of classes. Unbundling might happen but expect the per chapter costs to be quite high and many consumers to save nothing from this unbundling.
