Apple
Announces Efforts to ?Reinvent? Textbooks
by
Nancy K.
Herther
Posted On January 26, 2012
In an effort to “reinvent” textbooks, Apple
unveiled a suite of tools and
resources geared to the K-12 education market on Jan. 19
at New York's Guggenheim Museum . In the first
major product announcement since the passing of Steve Jobs,
the new products were introduced by Philip Schiller, Apple
senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “With 1.5
million iPads already in use in education institutions,
including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is
rapidly being adopted by schools across the U.S. and around
the world,” he noted.
The trio of products launched were the following.
iBooks 2 for iPad
app is a free download from the App
Store that allows users to view the etextbooks as
“fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams,
videos and photos; the iBooks 2 app will let students
learn about the solar system or the physics of a
skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that
come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger.”
iBooks Author, is a free
authoring tool that allows “anyone with a Mac … [to]
create stunning iBooks textbooks.”
An “all-new iTunes U app,” intends to
give “educators and students everything they need on
their iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch to teach and take
entire courses.” Apple’s Eddy Cue noted that the
University of Paris, UC Berkeley, and UCLA were already
using iTunes U to supplement their curricular offerings.
IBISWorld analyst Mary Nanfelt
tells NewsBreaks that “Apple has a strong future for
ebook sales. Many consumers are used to accessing iTunes
regularly to purchase movies and music and are likely to
at least browse ebooks while they’re already on the site,
and with the rising popularity of the iPhone and iPad,
the traffic to iTunes will only increase.”
Apple also announced agreements with three major textbook
publishers. Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill, and Pearson signed on to “deliver
educational titles on the iBookstore with most priced at
$14.99 or less.” These agreements appear to be, at this
point, more an opportunity for testing the apps
marketplace for educational release, with all three
companies fully intending to continue to create and sell
educational books through traditional channels as well.
“I say ‘way to go’ to Apple for kick-starting the eBook
education revolution,” notes Dan Pacheco, CEO of
BookBrewer, a multiplatform
publishing company. “But to educators and publishers I
say ‘caveat emptor’—keep your eBook options open.”
The K-12 Marketplace
The Association of American Publishers
notes that, for the most recently available data, “2010
net sales revenue for this category is $5.51 Billion. The
category showed a -12.4% decline from 2008-2009 but
rebounded in 2009-2010 with a +7.1% increase. This
translates to a change in net sales value over the
three-year period of -6.2%.” Schools have been hit
by recent economic downturns, affecting their ability to
expand or increase monies for resources and impacting
growth.
A report by digital textbook provider Xplana published last
year, projected etextbooks would take 6% of the market in
2012 and 44% by 2017. “School and college textbooks
account for an estimated 32% of industry revenue,” notes
Nanfelt.
Apple is chasing a global school and college textbook
market that publishing analysts at Outsell expect to reach $19.4
billion in 2013. The digital share of that market will
jump from 3.4% in 2010 to 18.3% next year, they forecast.
The U.S. Department of Education estimates that 55.4 million K-12
students are currently enrolled in public and private
schools in the U.S.. The process of selecting textbooks
for public schools (and many parochial) are approved by
either local school boards or even state-wide selections
groups. To assume that teachers or school districts will
move from an embedded system of textbook selection to the
Apps store is a bit naive—just as thinking that anyone
(after all, the software is free) can be a successful
textbook author at the price point of under $15. Schools
also have to be very concerned with ubiquitous access to
content and ADA compliance—issues yet to be addressed.
Apple’s Continuing Battles for Ebook
Marketshare
In the 7 years that Apple has offered music through its
iTunes store, an estimated 15 billion songs have been
downloaded to the more than 200 million iOS devices. In
the 3 years of the Apps store, an estimated 14
billion apps have been downloaded. In
addition to Google, Amazon, and other ebook and media
providers, Apple has its own share of issues with which
to contend. Apple has also worked through the courts to
fight competitors and battle to protect their
intellectual property and challenges to their practices.
The European Commission, some
states attorneys general, and the U.S. Department of
Justice are actively investigating Apple’s
potential collusion with the Big Six book publishers to
set ebook pricing. The cases may make it into court this
year. Apple also lost a bid to ban the sales of
Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1) smartphones in a effort to
legally define what aspects of device design infringe on
Apple’s intellectual property rights.
Increased competition is inevitable since it’s impossible
to believe that Google, Amazon, and others aren’t
planning their own new introductions for this market
sector.
Publishers’ Perspectives
Joe Esposito, management consultant and former publishing
CEO and blogger at the Scholarly Kitchen, notes
that, “as publishers, you really have to consider that
there might be a really large-scale acquisition that
might lead to a large, structural change to the entire
industry. But you also have to think in terms of why
people like your products. I think what’s happening now
is that these transformations are resulting in publishers
becoming more aware of the distinctiveness of their own
products. They are no longer in a position to muscle
their way into some market, they have to succeed on the
strength of their content, and that’s a big change. There
are just too many options out there.”
Smashwords and Amazon’s
CreateSpace are two examples of
services offering support for self-publishing or other
types of nontraditional publishing.
Data Conversion Laboratory
surveyed publishers recently and found that 63% planned
to publish an ebook this year. DCL president and CEO Mark
Gross tells NewsBreaks that, “as far as I can tell,
everyone is moving to ebooks; except for some very
specialized areas, no publisher will be able to stay
behind. While today it’s still a niche, in another year
or two, it will no longer be a niche area; every type of
publisher is either experimenting, or actually is already
in some level of volume production.”
“Apple has been a critical catalyst in opening up the
book market, similar to what they did for the music
industry,” Gross continues. “But the difference is that
in book publishing, there are a lot of big and creative
players, so it’s hard to predict where it will all fall
out, and I would guess there’s room for even more
players.”
“We must now figure out how to remain true to that
mission while broadening our scope from creators of books
to creators of content in multiple formats,” notes
Andrea Fleck-Nisbet, digital
publishing director at Workman Publishing. “We must
continue to produce the best content possible while
investing in the digital business in service of content
and platforms yet to come.”
“E-book platforms allow more authors to self publish and
retain a larger proportion of value chain for
themselves,” Nanfelt explains, “which is a risk for
publishing companies. Although growth in e-books is
expected to promote growth in the total book market, it
could pressure publishers to share a higher proportion of
their revenue with authors or platform providers. This
could affect publishers’ profit margins.” Pricing will be
interesting using the iTunes and iBook platforms. Apps
and ebooks are very fundamentally different types of
products, requiring separate consideration when it comes
to pricing and terms of use.
“As for overall revenues,” Hyperion CEO Ellen
Archer explains, “let’s just say, as we
move forward, we’re going to have to create new models.
This business model, while it’s never been great, is
broken; 2012 is going to be about finding new business
models.”
Disintermediating Education
In his book, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
wrote, “Jobs believed that all books should be digital
and interactive, tailored to each student and providing
feedback in real time.” In the book, Jobs is reported to
having called the current textbook approval system
“corrupt,” and expressed his desire to transform it. At
the press conference, Schiller was quick to credit these
new product initiatives to the work and vision of Jobs.
In his lifetime, Jobs was able to lead in the
transformation of many key industries or product areas:
Animated films (through Pixar), music distribution and
listening (through iTunes and iPods), computers (through
the Macintosh line), phones (with the sleek iPhone),
tablet computers (with iPad), and retail marketing (with
the success of the Apps store for books and other types
of media). However, with their effort to disintermediate
K-12 education, Jobs and Apple may have entered into an
arena beyond their depth, in which sleek designs and
coolness factors are outweighed by other considerations.
Even with well-qualified authors and scientific findings
on your side, many textbooks are still found unacceptable
to local standards or controversial due to subject matter
(such as evolution). Into this highly charged, highly
regulated arena, the cost of the iPad (just under $500
each) makes it difficult to imagine that schools, let
alone parents, could afford these devices especially in a
country in which one of every five children lives in
poverty today.
Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are
all major, traditional educational publishers, willing to
dabble in this new approach and publishing platform. And,
why not? They have little to lose. For non-essential
educational materials, intended to supplement classroom
work or to allow for self-education, the Apps approach
holds promise. And priced at $14.99 or less, these should
attract a good business—but this is still no challenge to
the educational publishing industry. McGraw-Hill’s own
STEM marketing VP, Lisa O'Masta was quoted as
saying that “the common myth is that anybody can create
quality content and curriculum; the reality is there’s a
lot that goes into what curriculum is created.”
Open Access Versus Closed Architecture
Apple’s approach since the early days of the Macintosh
has been a closed, proprietary architecture. Something as
universal as learning and education would seem to demand
an open standard. For ebooks, we have that with HTML 5
and EPUB 3. Although Apple is a member of the
International Digital Publishing
Forum, which controls the EPUB standards,
zdnet.com’s Ed Bott notes that “the new
iBooks 2.0 format adds CSS extensions that are not
documented as part of the W3C standard. It uses a closed,
proprietary Apple XML namespace. The experts I’ve
consulted think it deliberately breaks the open
standard.”
Closer examination of Apple’s iBooks Author license
agreement also betrays very restrictive terms for
author-generated content. For example, “the agreement
restricts paid distribution of ‘works’ created with the
software to the iBookstore only.” And for schools,
“Windows still commands at least 85 percent of the global
marketshare, and the fact that PCs are still cheap and
Mac OS X doesn’t run on PCs, it cuts out a hefty portion
of Windows-running schools,” notes zdnet’s Zack Whittaker.
“Cynically,” Bott concludes, “Apple is
positioning this authoring tool and the new format as the
savior of K-12 education. All school districts have to do
is buy one iPad for every student and buy textbooks
through the iTunes Store, and their problems are solved.
Wrapping themselves in the education flag is a
transparent attempt to win praise and deflect
criticism.”
Pacheco tells NewsBreaks that the fragile nature of the
devices will cause schools to have to divert funds to
cover the iPads costs, and then: “The next step will be
that the iPads will only be available in a ‘safe’ place,
such as a computer lab. The kids’ normally freeform
reading time with printed books will shift to a very
controlled experience where they sit at desks in a lab
and carefully swipe through pages on an iPad—all while
budget-conscious computer teachers nervously watch them
to make sure they don’t destroy the devices.”
Looking for Change
Ohio State University’s Steve Acker, research director of
eTextOhio Project tells
NewsBreaks that “the major trend in textbooks that I can
ascertain is continuing and growing dissatisfaction with
the current model. This applies to all involved in the
distribution system—the author, publisher, bookstore,
institution, faculty, students. We would hope that all
innovative and powerful tools/content creators maintain
momentum toward permitting eReaders/browsers to be
capable of ingesting and presenting EPUB content. Apple’s
new tool doesn’t do this in its current form. This could
be a purposeful market lock-out, or a test environment
for innovation in which EPUB3 ultimately embraces the
file format extensions that give iAuthor its power. Time
will tell, but I’d bet on Open Standards winning out over
proprietary when the adoption decision is at the
group/institution level rather than the individual.”
In the first 3 days after the announcement, the iBooks 2
saw 350,000 downloads, and iBooks Author had 90,000—which
is a good indicator of interest in Apple’s
offerings. However, at least for the
authoring component, there has been at least as much
criticism of the licensing structure as there are
plaudits for the quality of the product.
OA & Other Options
Textbooks are neither lightweight nor cheap.
Bowker’s PubTrack data
for 2010 found that the average college textbook cost
$104.14, an increase of more than 24% since the 2005
average of $83.73. However worthy the Apple may be, there
are many other approaches to improving textbooks and
learning today. Change is taking place in two significant
areas of the textbook and education marketplace: Open
Access and open courseware.
Major digital textbook providers in the U.S. today
include CafeScribe, CourseSmart, Vitalsource/Ingram, and
Xplana. Perhaps even more
significant is the growing interest in Open Access
etextbooks, with leadership from Flat
World Knowledge a publisher of
college-level open textbooks and educational supplement,
Conexions, Open
Access Textbooks Project, Wikibooks open-content textbooks,
the K-12 California Open Source Textbook
Project, and CK-12
Foundation.
Open, collaborative course development, spurred largely
by higher education, includes the MIT spinoff
OpenCourseWare Consortium,
Carnegie Mellon University’s Open
Learning Initiative, MERLOT, “a leading edge,
user-centered, collection of peer reviewed higher
education, online learning materials”—these are key
options. So, efforts to change many aspects of
education—from preschool through continuing adult
education—are underway, with or without Apple’s
involvement.
Patrick Martin, “the Motley
Fool,” notes that “at the bare minimum, the technology
that replaces textbooks must work across multiple
platforms and be capable of running on the cheapest
hardware. Anything short of that will just be another
thing that only more prosperous parents can purchase in
hopes of giving their children a leg up. There’s nothing
wrong with that, but it’s not a revolution.”
Evolution or Revolution?
“The phrase which keeps coming up in my mind about
ebooks,” notes Faber & Faber’s Henry
Volans, “is evolution; I have absolute
certainty that we have not reached anything close to the
evolutionary ideal of the ebook…I find it absolutely
inconceivable that the book can’t evolve and change and
grow.”
For Apple to truly be seen as a major supplier of K-12
educational content, it needs to adapt its products and
expectations to the standards and norms of the industry.
To serve needs of users, open up to whatever
format/standard/computer system the users want instead of
controlling this. Instead of making licensing so
restrictive and controlling, become the cloud-based hub
for innovative learning and teaching. Instead of relying
on the current, fragile iPad units—even with high school
students, who tend to drop their backpacks on floors, in
lockers, in the backseats of cars with a bang—give them a
ruggedized version that might last longer than until the
next iteration of the iPad. Schools are cash-strapped. If
Apple really wants to jump-start the adoption of iPads,
bring the price down—we are in a recession after all. To
really get this off the ground, announce this at a major
education conference or publishers confab, not at the
Guggenheim, which reinforces the coolness image of Apple,
but doesn’t translate directly to the core audience of
these initiatives.
For a company that is reportedly sitting on a nest egg of
nearly $100 billion cash, is today’s largest technology
company by market value in the world, and with a market
value estimated at $400 billion, many were less than
impressed. “I think that the announcement does more to
reinvent business models and practices than it does to
reinvent textbooks,” Outsell’s Kate Worlock explains to
NewsBreaks. “The new iBook 2 textbooks, while impressive,
aren’t terribly different to something you’d see from
Inkling or in Nature Education’s new Principles of
Biology. Of course, iBooks 2
focuses more on K-12, so it’s new for that market, but
not revolutionary.”
Is this a good deal for authors or publisher partners? “I
don't think it’s a good deal, however, for either
potential authors or educators/students. The degree of
control which Apple expects to be able to impose on the
market will be stifling, particularly at a time when
schools and individuals are struggling financially,”
Worlock continues. “I think the authoring tool will help
the open textbook movement in one way, in that it
provides a free and very easy to use platform to create
extremely professional products. How easy that content
will then be to share remains an issue. I think that all
of these products are competing now, with each other and
with all of the free content which is available online.
However, from an educator’s perspective, what’s needed is
(a) a guarantee of quality, and (b) the ability to
connect textbook content with other activities. Usability
will be a key platform on which these products compete.”
The winners in all of this are readers, potential ebook
authors, publishers, and others. Apple has, in a sense,
legitimized ebooks and elevated the format and created a
buzz throughout the industry, and brought in additional
players into the mix. Ultralight laptops may find a role
here as well, since a lot of education involves students
developing more than just point and swipe operations, but
actual reading, writing, and other skills. All of these
wonderful new technologies should be giving everyone
options, alternative models, and room for true
innovation.
Writing in Nature on the death of Steve Jobs,
Tim O'Reilly noted that
aesthetics was “key to Jobs’s marketing genius. U.S. art
critic Dave Hickey once said that when products become
commodities, as personal computers had become, they
become ‘art markets’ in which products are sold not on
the basis of what they do but what they mean.” Cachet may
work for individuals, but for cash-strapped schools,
Apple’s products need to provide a whole lot more in
terms of performance and pricing. Time will tell.
Read more from the original source:
Apple Announces Efforts to ‘Reinvent’ Textbooks
