Nothing sets techies—and increasingly, the rest of the world— abuzz like a product announcement from Apple. With its penchant for secrecy and over–the-top product rollouts, Apple aficionados and the similarly tech savvy alike wait with baited breath to see if the California-based computer, software and mobile device manufacturer is unveiling its next iPad or simply an update to its Macintosh Operating System, OSX.
In January, Apple announced updates to its iBooks iPad application and a new iBooks Author application that will allow anyone with an Apple computer to create electronic books for distribution on Apple’s iBookstore. Combining these announcements with news of product partnerships with publishing companies Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson to bring inexpensive, auto-updating textbooks to the iPad and iBookstore, many commentators suspect Apple wants to light a fire under the textbook publishing industry the same way its iTunes store made the company a player in music distribution.
“Now you can be the publisher,” education blogger, Nick Provenzano (TheNerdyTeacher.com) exclaimed in a column for Edutopia. “I'm most excited about this development. As an English teacher, I now have the ability to put together the stories, lessons, notes and links that I want and share it with my students. I can upload it to the iBookstore and even save it as a PDF. Students can have access to everything I want them to without having to deal with the excess material that I do not use in our textbook.”
Giving voice to what the announcement could mean for higher education, Georgia College’s own Dr. Frank Lowney writes that the tools afforded educators through the iBooks Author application could do more than simply remove heavy textbooks from students’ backpacks.
“For the first time in history, colleges and universities fully control the means of eTextbook production, start to finish, inception to delivery,” he writes on his Thinking About Tomorrow blog. “They need no help in producing world class eTextbooks. The seeds of revolution are in hand.”
But Lowney, who has spent years working on and writing about the transition to electronic publishing, says the electronic textbook revolution will not take place unless it firmly implants itself into the minds of would be revolutionaries:
Having in hand the means of production is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for this revolution to actually occur. [Subject Matter Experts] are essential to this process and have had opportunities to dis-intermediate the publishing industry before but didn't do it. Why didn't that happen and why might that not happen in the near future? The answer and therefore the enemy of this revolution, is institutional tradition.
Lowney contends that the ability to create iBooks does little to implement etextbooks as a classroom standard without a corresponding set of standards for incentivizing content creation. The iBookstore model improves the revenue sharing model for authors—70% of sales instead of 25% royalties—but that won’t foment a revolution of electronic textbook publishing should institutions of higher education decide not to recognize these self-published etexts when considering their authors for promotion and tenure.
To that end, Apple’s iBook announcement does little to address the challenge at the heart of the transition to electronic texts: There is no shortage of platforms on which audiences can consume information, but there is yet to be the quality content that turns one platform into a standard and makes that platform a necessity for the consumer.
The invention of the printing press did not force monks to lay down their pens; it was the popularity of the Gutenberg Bible that set history in type.
The partnerships Apple announced with top-shelf publishers in the education marketplace show that the company knows consumers will not use these tools if there is no quality content to be had using them. But Apple has never made any claims to be content provider; they simply perfect the tools content creators must have to make their next masterpiece.
If you’re curious about the platforms the readers of the future will be using to enjoy their favorite texts, the Georgia College Library offers a number of ebooks through GALILEO and EBSCOhost. And the Instructional Technology Center has 50 iPad 2s available for checkout to Georgia College students. So, read your next novel or textbook in electronic format and let us know your thoughts on the future of the book in the comments section below.
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