(Apple’s) Common Sense

Very few things in life are free. But honestly, how often is it that you’ll find yourself paying more for something than you originally anticipated? Hidden fees are one of the worst. It’s not fun to pay for something, but having to pay more than you originally anticipated, especially unsuspectingly, is just cruel.

Personally, I’ve always felt textbooks were one of those hidden fees that students could not avoid. It’s not like I’m not expecting to pay for materials to learn (on top of the already rising fees of tuition of course), but when you take four or five classes a quarter, each boasting an incredulous $100 price tag for a book that you really only dip into every once in a while and then never use again, I can’t help but feel like I’ve just been bound, gagged, and tossed into the Mississippi.

Credits flickr/kyz

If a textbook is required for a class, the students really have no choice but to buy it. The supplier of these books, which in most cases is the publisher, understand this fact and so they hike up the price of the book knowing that they will still sell them since no one else can supply the item.

School bookstores also understand that many students are either too lazy to search around for a cheap used version or just don’t know that it’s possible to get these books from outside sources, and so they too hike up their prices. In the end it’s the students who have to bite the bullet and fork over excessive cash for books that 95% they’ll have absolutely zero use for in the future.

Well, after years of abuse, someone has finally stepped up to stop the injustice – cue Apple.

On Thursday, January 19^th, Apple’s vice president Phil Schiller held an “education event” at Guggenheim Museum in which they revealed a few new toys; one of which was this little tool called iBooks Author.

In a nutshell, iBooks Author allows just about anyone to create a professionally looking iBook and put it in the iBookstore (either for sale or for free), simply. What’s more is that it’s completely free.

You basically drag-and-drop your content into the iBooks Author, submit it to Apple, they look it over, and if approved, poof, you now own an iBook.

Now there are many incredible aspects to this tool and the influence it’s going to have on the textbook market. Yes, I said textbook – the $100, 500 page behemoths all students encounter at some point during their journey with Academia.

The most important development of the introduction of this product? Try the $15 price tag for any given textbook on the site – maximum.

Now you may be asking, “How can Apple sell such expensive books for $15? Why would any large publishing companies want to do any business with them whatsoever; wouldn’t they be losing money?” When confronted with these very questions, Terry McGraw, McGraw-Hill CEO, responded, “Volume.”

Here’s the deal. Large publishing companies typically sell their books to public schools for an average of $75. Public schools will hold onto these books for an average of five years. During those five years, the books can be passed down, traded, sold, or what have you. In this way, Terry McGraw isn’t selling more books to the school for the next half-decade.

Well, what Apple’s new iBooks Author program is doing is this: They allow students to buy the books straight from the publishing company. The book is the student’s to keep, but they aren’t able to sell it, either to their school’s bookstore or another student, let alone pass it down.

So when new students the following year need copies of these books of their own, they will have to buy them themselves. Over the next five years, Terry McGraw is ensured that new students have to purchase books from them. $15 each book x 5 years = $75, which was their five year average anyways. Plus the publishing company gets to save on paper, ink, manufacturing costs, and shipping. It’s a win-win situation for both sides.

Credits flickr/txtbks

This deal would still be amazing if Terry McGraw was the only publishing company Apple had struck a deal with. However, the word on the street is that we’re going to see textbooks from other publishing giants such as Houghton Mifflin and Pearson as well. These three companies alone constitute 90% of all textbook production.

Apple’s new iBooks Authors tool effectively stops the publisher and bookstore’s markups on textbooks. This is reason alone for me to find room in my budget to buy an iPad – or more like it finds it’s own room.

After calculating the price of the tablet and including the additional cost to buy the books with Apple’s new system, it’s already cheaper than it would have been for me to buy the physical books themselves. And now you can use the iPad over and over again, not to mention the relief of not having to lug around an additional 10 pounds on your back all day, since all of the information will be stored on one easy, convenient, lightweight device.

And have I mentioned how absolutely stunning the display is? The iPad itself runs on a 9.7 inch display, at a gorgeous 1024-by-768 pixel resolution, boasting 132 ppi, which allows pictures to show up incredibly beautifully, not to mention making reading text easy on the eyes.

You’ll also never have to worry about bringing the wrong book to class again since they’ll all be contained in one handy device.

Better yet, the display is tremendously interactive. Straight from Apple’s website, “With galleries, video, interactive diagrams, 3D objects, and more, these books bring content to life in ways the printed page never could.” With such features available, I just can’t see how traditional textbooks could even begin to compete.

Let’s delve into some of the program’s specifics:

Credits flickr/yto

1. You’ll need Lion to run it, but the Apple’s iBooks Author is a simple free download after that.

2. Transferring your work into Apple’s iBooks Author couldn’t be easier. There is drag-and-drop functionality from any Word document into the program, which then splits up the text and creates headers and sections for your work by itself. In fact, adding pretty much anything to your iBook requires only a simple drag-and-drop action. Talk about easy to use.

3. For all of you techy-types out there, Apple states that the books created with the iBooks Author software can be coded with JavaScript and HTML to include custom widgets in order to enhance the experience for your readers.

4. Once finished, you simply connect an iPad to your computer to proof the work and double check the look of the layout on the tablet itself. Once you approve of the look, it’s a simple click of a button to submit to the iBookstore.

5. Be warned: The software’s fine print states that while your content remains your own, you cannot distribute a file you made with iBooks Author on any site other than Apple’s iBookstore. So if you want to use their software, you’re going to have to agree to only distribute the finished product through the iBookstore.

Basically now anyone with any sort of knowledge can make a professionally looking book, guide, or tutorial at absolutely zero cost to him or her, and it’s no more difficult than a simple drag-and-drop function.

The books themselves are incredibly interactive, allowing you to highlight, watch movies, take quizzes, and even turn information you select directly into flash cards that you can study from. As far as I’m concerned, I cannot wait for these digital textbooks to hit the digital shelves sooner.

As a student, and therefore a textbook extraordinaire, I’d just like to say, “Thanks, Apple. You’ve done it again.”