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An Alternative to Printed Textbooks
By Deborah Williams
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The recent announcement of Apple’s iBooks 2 may signal a paradigm shift for students in the near future. NPR’s website posts an article “Apple Pushes to Put Interactive Textbooks on iPads” that lays out Apple’s plan to replace a typical student’s stack of printed textbooks. Their launch will begin with electronic versions of some high school textbooks from well-known educational publishers like Pearson and McGraw-Hill.
Of course, these versions have interactive features such as animation and explanatory videos to accompany the content. The primary allure of this offering is that each electronic textbook is only about $15. The drawback? The iPads are about $500 each. Currently, school systems go through a lengthy adoption process to choose the textbook, and they use those adopted texts for several years before choosing another one to replace it.
How this would play out is unclear. Spending thousands of dollars on a textbook adoption happens about once every five or six years, so would electronic textbooks mean that a school system would be spending money each year for textbooks? Another consideration is that the initial outlay for iBooks would be significant and would need to be replaced every three or four years. It will be interesting to see how Apple and its eventual competitors will infuse this into the education culture.
The following video gives a more enhanced explanation of this educational launch:
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