In the beginning of the presentation Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said electronic textbooks were superior paper textbooks. He said electronic textbooks are more portable, durable, interactive, searchable, and current than traditional textbooks.
He ceded that both types of textbooks contain great content. A nice hat tip to the textbook publishers in the room.
I didn’t agree with all of Phil’s argument. There’s a low tech solution to the portability problem. Have students keep their textbooks at home and use an in-class copy. Schools need to buy just one extra copy. The take-home books should wear out more slowly because they are not carried around as much.
And dead-tree textbooks can really take a beating! Ever dropped an iPad?
However, there’s no doubt that the iPad has a rich selection of education and productivity apps that make it an excellent learning tool. iBooks textbooks give us one more thing to add to the arsenal.
iBooks textbooks are only available on the iPad. Why just the iPad? Obviously its the only iOS device with a screen large enough to display full pages of content alongside rich interactive elements. Not a problem.
What about the Mac, then? Nope. You can not read iBooks on a Mac. I didn’t mis-type that. This is not a special limitation for textbooks. No iBooks can be read on the world’s best personal computer. (Cough! Amazon Kindle!)
Part of me thinks this is an early days limitation that will be resolved in a future release. The cynical side of me suspects its part of a copyright protection scheme.
Sure. Reading on a large computer screen at a desk is not ideal. And a laptop is pretty crappy for reading too. So I never had a problem with this limitation. My Kindle is ideal for reading novels. And I turn to my iPad when reading books with full color illustrations, programing code samples, and when I need faster searching and page turns than the Kindle.
But, research and content creation is far more productive on a Mac than an iPad. It would be great to have the textbook–with your embedded notes and highlights–available on screen when writing a paper or creating a Keynote presentation. Yes. You can do those things on an iPad. The process is much smoother on a computer with a keyboard and a mouse with multiple windows open at once.
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In my previous post I mentioned that one of the big problems we face is that writing e-books with advanced content and layout requirements is very complex. I think iBooks Author solves this problem well, even for a first version. It’s extremely easy to use. I can definitely see people creating their own books with it.
I investigated EPUB 3 for a project last Spring. I wanted to use EPUB 3’s content overlay feature to highlight the words in a book in sync with a narration. But I didn’t have the resources to create my own reader application. iBooks should be able to host that content now. I’ll have to investigate this.
Another intriguing feature of iBooks Author is HTML widgets. HTML widgets allow iBooks to include interactive elements created in Dashcode. What I want to find out is if these widgets can access the Internet from within the book. My first guess would be: no. I can see Internet access being blocked for security purposes. But I hope it’s not. Having access to the ‘net from a widget would allow me to combine a textbook with services like the Townsend Press Learning Center.
Definitely interesting times.
]]>I think Apple is most likely going to disrupt the content creation and distribution part of the textbook business, democratizing those in exchange for a cut of the revenue–just like they do with iBooks, Apps, and music. And, just like when they announced the iPhone saying that even 1% of the mobile phone market would make it a profitable endeavor, they don’t need massive traction to cause an irreversible change in the market.
Think about the ease at which a bright teacher could use a Mac with Keynote, iMovie (or Final Cut), and friends to make great course content. The problems, as I see them, are the complexity of authoring, packaging, marketing, and distribution. All things Apple can simplify for content creators.
It’s also possible that adding interactivity alone is not the revolution Apple has in mind. Maybe They’re bringing technology into education in a whole new way. iClassroom? Apple does not have a good track record with Internet (cloud) services and social networks–though they are clearly working on that part of their game.
We’ll have to wait and see.
]]>My previous false start at this (there have been a few) was a Tumblr blog. I really like the social component of Tumblr. But I never developed a habit of visiting the site regularly. Introverted geek? Too old (you kids get off my lawn!)? Whatever the case. Tumblr was one of those toys that sat on my shelf collecting dust.
I set off looking for a blogging project that publishes everything “baked” as static content. Publishing a static site has been a popular topic lately. And, although I don’t need to withstand a Fireballing, there’s something really elegant about creating a completely static site from a dynamic back-end.
I planned on giving Second Crack by Marco Arment a try. Marco–who created the excellent Instapaper service and writes some great blog posts–recently open sourced his bespoke PHP blogging engine on Github. I’m an old PHP hack and I’m interested in reading some of Marco’s code. No brainer. Right?
What I like most about Second Crack is its workflow. You post by creating a draft markdown file in a Dropbox folder. When you’re ready to publish you move your draft into another folder. Second Crack runs in the background, detects changes, and publishes your site automatically. Really slick!
I haven’t had a chance to review Second Crack at length. I’m too buried in work right now to give it the time it deserves. And Marco would be the first person to admit that Second Crack is “still rough and unfriendly.” So I’ll have to back-burner it for the time being.
Octopress is “a blogging framework for hackers” where you create site posts
as plain text Markdown files. Then you run rake tasks to generate and
publish the site. It comes with some really useful plugins for embedding images
and videos, quoting other people, adding snippets of code, and a lot more.
As a programmer, Octopress feels like a better fit than a hosted solution. There are plenty of nerdy internals to fool around with. From the start your site is chopped up nicely into a sane collection of easily-customized templates. Theming is done with Compass and Sass. There are really too many open source goodies baked in to mention here.
Installation was a breeze (for a programmer) because I already had some Ruby development prerequisites installed. I just cloned the Git repository, tweaked a couple of configuration files, added my logo, and I was off to the races.
Octopress doesn’t have the auto-publishing features of Second Crack. But that’s a small problem I’ll enjoy solving.
In the end I chose Octopress because it hits all of my nerd buttons. Markdown feels more natural than raw HTML or some WYSIWYG editor. Sass is the greatest thing since… well… CSS. And I’m feeling closer to the open source community already (that’s a topic for another day).
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