Apple’s tablet a boon for textbook publishers
Many e-reader devices are changing how publishers deal with readers, but the upcoming Apple tablet computer will have a larger impact than most, and publishers are gearing up for that, especially in the education field.
The Apple tablet computer is going to have some advantages, it seems, over the rest of the e-reader competition. If nothing else, the vast majority of other e-readers have grayscale screens and therefore cannot render color, according to a Wall Street Journal article, and they stop at the written word. These things are not critical for all applications, though they would be nice in most. The publishers of textbooks, however, given the large number of color illustrations, photographs, charts, and graphs that are used in that type of publication, are hungrily eying the all-color tablet multi-media.
The Apple tablet is also a product from a major electronics manufacturer with an excellent reputation for quality products and customer service. It therefore represents the sort of quality platform on which a high-quality text book would look good, and will faithfully represent the printed original. The size of the device is also in the right range, especially given that it has the ability to display in either portrait or landscape mode simply by turning it into the desired orientation. Another key quality is the ability to link to and display other data sources, such as video, audio, and Web pages.
To this end, the e-textbook publisher CourseSmart is looking hard at the Apple tablet as a textbook platform, even though there is currently nothing for them to physically look at yet. Coursesmart Executive Vice President Frank Lyman looks at it this way: “The key is that with multifunction devices, you can do more than just read the textbook. You can interact with the content. It is all about having your textbooks integrated with other tools and resources that you use for learning. … Our objective is to make sure that people who are producing these devices are thinking about education.”
Other publishers of quality books and magazines may well see the issue the same way. The information that they are trying to get across is complex. Features like color, video, and audio make it easier for the publisher to get that information to the reader, and also makes it easier and more pleasant for the reader to absorb. Such a device may be more expensive, but in order to use anything less, a publisher may well have to debase their own products.
Related Posts:
