Startup Gives Digital Textbooks the Ol’ College Try

E-books may be taking off for Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, but there’s one category of printed matter where digital hasn’t made a dent: textbooks.

It’s not for lack of trying. Most textbooks are massive tomes that weigh several pounds, are printed on hundreds of pages of glossy paper, can cost upwards of $100, and are often out of date as soon as they’re printed. You’d think someone would have figured out how to make e-textbooks work — and plenty of companies have tried.

Yet print still rules, with over 99 percent of the textbook market. But with the rise of tablets and e-readers, software developers and textbook publishers are making yet another effort to take textbooks digital.

Matt MacInnis is one of the new hopefuls. For eight years, he worked at Apple’s education division. But last year, when the iPad was still just a rumor, MacInnis started thinking about starting a digital textbooks venture. He left Apple to follow his dream, and the result is Inkling, which launched two months ago.

Inkling is an iPad app that turns textbooks into bite-sized, illustrated, interactive pieces of media. With Inkling, William Strunk’s Elements of Style is reinvented with humorous hints and cheeky cartoons, while a biology textbook has beautiful diagrams and color photos.

“With the iPad, there’s an obvious opportunity in education,” says MacInnis.

Inkling allows readers to jump into any chapter. Users don’t have to buy the entire textbook: They can just buy a few chapters and later get the entire textbook.

Inkling is just one of the companies looking for a way to make digital textbooks work. Earlier this year, textbook publishers such as McGraw Hill and Kaplan struck a partnership with software company ScrollMotion to bring textbooks to the iPad.

Digital textbooks have been struggling to take off for nearly a decade. Publishers were slow to adapt print editions to PCs and professors don’t usually recommend digital textbooks to their students. And for all their texting and video games, some say, students are not as comfortable with the technology as you might think.

“There is the issue of trust,” says Kenneth C. Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, which looks at use of IT in education. “Even though we think of this generation of students as being wired, they have dealt with print all their life for core education. They know how to master that but they are less certain of electronic material.”

Last year, digital textbooks generated an estimated $40 million in sales, according to Xplana, an educational software and consulting company. This year, it is expected to grow to $80 million — but that’s still just 1 percent of the total higher education textbook market. By 2015, Xplana estimates digital textbooks will be 20 percent of the total market.

But a lot has to change in the next four years before that prediction can become reality.

Why haven’t digital textbooks taken off?

Despite their promise, digital textbooks haven’t taken off for two big reasons: ease of use and price.

Publishers have long been offering some textbooks for PCs but these digital editions have never entirely replaced their paper cousins.

Digital textbooks haven’t become really popular because they aren’t easy to use on computers, says MacInnis.

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Photos: Putting Kindle 2 and Kindle 3 Head-to-Head

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Kindle 3 on Left, Kindle 2 on Right
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Most user reviews of the new Kindle 3, especially those with photo spreads, have focused on the newly-available graphite model, but if you really want to see the differences in the hardware, screen quality, and web capabilities in the new model, it may be more useful to put the two white models head-to-head.

That’s just what Andrys Basten did at her blog A Kindle World. They might be the first user photos of the white Kindle 3 online (I haven’t been able to find any earlier ones).

Also, if you pay close attention, there are terrific user tips for Kindle 3 users embodied in these photos. I’ve been really impressed by the new WebKit browser, but found full-sized web sites harder to navigate than their mobile versions. When I saw Basten’s pictures, I said, “Oh, put the NYT in landscape, not portrait! That’s genius!”

There are a few dumb things the Kindle’s web browser can’t do. Clicking on a link that tries to force you to open a new window just gets you a “this web browser does not support multiple windows” message. You can easily edit titles of bookmarks but not URLs. Drop-down menus sometimes just fool the browser altogether.

And to get to the web browser at all, you’ve got to go to the “Experimental” section of the menu, then tinker around in there for a while. (Would you guess to change the orientation from portrait to landscape, you should click the font-size button? I wouldn’t.)

Amazon’s packed plenty of smart features into its web browser, but mostly failed to acknowledge them, Basten told Wired.com. “Amazon’s paying for the Kindle’s 3G access,” she says. They “will be conflicted about [heavy internet use], and it shows.”

But once you get the hang of these little tricks — use mobile URLs in portrait, full URLs in landscape, use the built-in article mode (just like Safari’s Reader/Readability/Instapaper) whenever you can, and start building up your own workarounds — the web browsing capability on the Kindle 3 is really tremendous. Newspapers, blogs, Twitter, Google Reader — it does them all well. It’s not just an e-book reader; it’s an honest-to-goodness reading machine.

All images courtesy of Andrys Basten and A Kindle World.

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Amazon Kindle review (2010)

Amazon’s third major iteration of its flagship reading device, the Kindle, comes out of the gate looking strong: the new graphite finish (just like its big brother, the Kindle DX) with a slimmer, lighter form factor, plus a bumped refresh rate for its E Ink screen. Best of all, the WiFi only and 3G readers have newly lowered prices (though they’re still not exactly bargain basement level). We’ve spent the past few days putting the tinier Kindle through the paces to see just how much Amazon’s improved it. Though the market is increasingly flooded with cheap readers, the Kindle is arguably still the leading name in the field, and Amazon is already touting the third model as its bestselling ever — even though there are still no sales figures to be had. So, is this the best Kindle ever? Read on to find out.

Continue reading Amazon Kindle review (2010)

Amazon Kindle review (2010) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 27 Aug 2010 13:05:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Despite Reports, BN Nook Competes Just Fine, Thank You

You might think it was already dead, but sales for the Barnes & Noble Nook (both B&N-branded hardware and multi-platform software apps) are booming.

The company’s web stores are doing great, too: B&N has a bigger share of the market in digital books (an estimated 20 percent) than it has in physical books.

That’s pretty good considering the Nook’s only been available for nine months, and the company still generates more revenue selling hardcovers and paperbacks than anyone, including Amazon.

Surprised? It’s easy to think about e-reading as a two-horse race, with Amazon’s austere text-centric Kindle facing off against Apple’s “magical” iPad, like PCs vs Macs or Protestants vs Catholics. And it’s true, Barnes & Noble lost money this past quarter, partly because it’s still sorting out its messy relations with its investors.

But Barnes & Noble is for real, and isn’t going anywhere. In the religious analogy, the Nook might be, I don’t know, Judaism, trying to adapt to a newer world while holding onto its traditional community.

Barnes & Noble has consistently gone for a hybrid strategy: providing touch and text, tightly integrating e-sales with its existing stores while also selling the Nook at Best Buy, letting its books be read on the Nook as well as other platforms. B&N’s apps for PC and Mac are arguably best-in-class (bonus points, too, for getting its Mac app out way before Amazon’s). The company is doubling down on (and rebranding) its apps for mobile devices. And it’s drawing on a solid base of neighborhood customer/members and university bookstores. Even as Amazon cuts its prices and diversifies its models to match the Nook, it can’t match Barnes & Noble’s deep reach into the real world.

According to B&N, its members with Nooks have increased their spending by 20%. The company’s building and staffing Nook boutiques in its stores. The idea is that you’ll go buy the Nook in the store, learn how to use it in the store, browse through titles (for free) in the store. And by the way, you might also want to buy some coffee, have lunch, pick up a photo album — all goods with better margins than books.

If the Kindle offers the promise of books anywhere at once and nowhere in particular, the Nook keeps alive the idea that books have a place. And the best place, Barnes & Noble thinks, is in one of its stores.

Photo credit: orb9220/Flickr

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New Kindles are Amazon’s fastest-selling yet, start shipping today

It’s hard to begrudge Amazon this smug bit of PR it pushed out this morning, crowing over the sales success of its new Kindle line. The third-generation Kindles have more sales in the first four weeks of sales than any previous generation Kindles over the same time span — not exactly a surprise, but Amazon certainly isn’t off its game here. The new Kindles also maintain the e-reader’s two year reign as the best selling product on Amazon.com. As if in celebration of this continued success, Amazon says it’s starting to ship the new Kindles out today, two days earlier than the published released date. “You’re welcome,” Jeff Bezos mouths, soundlessly.

Continue reading New Kindles are Amazon’s fastest-selling yet, start shipping today

New Kindles are Amazon’s fastest-selling yet, start shipping today originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Entelligence: One device to rule them all — or not

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

The introduction of the third generation Kindle has reignites the debate over the role of dedicated vs. converged devices. Five years ago, device segmentation was easy: phones made calls, music players played music and cameras took pictures. Even two years ago, integrated devices remained differentiated from standalone devices that provided greater features and capabilities. But some now feel the market for dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle and Nook will soon disappear, subsumed by devices like tablets and smartphones capable of delivering e-books along with other content, applications and services.

It certainly feels to some degree that converged functionality is replacing the standalone and dedicated device. Look at the state-of-the-art iPod touch today and the state-of-the-art iPod of just three years ago. Compare the camera on your phone to the point and shoot digital of just four years ago. The argument seems strong for converged rather than dedicated and standalone devices.

I think the reality is a little more complicated.

Continue reading Entelligence: One device to rule them all — or not

Entelligence: One device to rule them all — or not originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 22 Aug 2010 17:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Qualcomm building a $2b Mirasol plant after winning ‘major client’?

Well, if this isn’t a statement of intent, we don’t know what is. Those good old market sources are reporting today that Qualcomm has set aside a cool $2 billion to build a new Mirasol display production plant in Taiwan. The chipmaker already has a Mirasol facility in Longtan, a joint venture with Foxlink, but is said to be the sole investor in this new build. The whole thing has apparently been spurred on by a major client having “already started the design-in process” after seeing production samples of the 5.7-inch, low power, color display. We can’t know for sure who that client may be, but Qualcomm’s been doing some real heavy flirting with Amazon and all those overtures might (might!) finally have paid off. Of couse, as Jeff Bezos himself said, a color Kindle isn’t likely to hit the market anytime soon, and this new factory isn’t expected to begin volume production until 2012, but we’ll take a slow and speculative roadmap over no roadmap at all.

Qualcomm building a $2b Mirasol plant after winning ‘major client’? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 05:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pictures: Kindle and iPad Screens Under Microscope

Keith, of tech blog BIT-101, got himself a new USB-microscope. And like any nerd with a new toy, he started pointing it at things around the house. Happily for us, Keith avoided magnifying the dog’s fleas and instead turned his high-powered eye on the screens of his twin tablets, Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad. As you see in the photos, the closer you get, the more interesting things become.

Above are pictures snapped at “about 26x” (the Kindle is on the left). So far, so expected, right? The Kindle’s e-ink display looks almost the same as it does to the naked eye, although one surprise is just how well the iPad’s anti-aliasing works to keep the text smooth, even though the pixels are clearly visible as jagged squares.

Jack things up to 400x and it gets a whole lot weirder. On the left again is the Kindle (400x). It resembles a bowl of sugar, or at least like some ink spattered on gray paper. As Keith says, it “looks almost organic”. Compare that to the iPad’s display at 375x, whose sharp edges and primary colors look more like a 1970s arcade game:

At his readers’ request, Keith then went on to snap pictures of ink on paper, adding newsprint, magazines and books to the gallery at the same magnifications. It’s a fascinating read. Go check it out.

Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal [BIT-101 via Hacker News]

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Engadget’s back to school guide: E-readers

Welcome to Engadget’s Back to School guide! We know that this time of year can be pretty annoying and stressful for everyone, so we’re here to help out with the heartbreaking process of gadget buying for the school-aged crowd. Today, we have e-readers in our sights — and you can head to the Back to School hub to see the rest of the product guides as they’re added throughout the month.

Engadget's back to school guide: E-readers
Yes, it’s the next round of buying advice for those of you condemned to start hitting the books at the end of the summer. But, with one of these e-readers, you might just have fewer books to hit — or at least lighter ones. Sadly most schools are still dependent on texts of the pulpy variety, but that doesn’t mean an e-reader can’t make your life a lot easier at school, and possibly even save you some money if you’re reading the classics.

Continue reading Engadget’s back to school guide: E-readers

Engadget’s back to school guide: E-readers originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Aug 2010 13:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Kobo E-readers Offered to Hotel Guests

Remember when hotels used to slip in a copy of USA Today or the Wall Street Journal under the door every morning?

Now, some are going digital and offering e-readers to their guests. Ten Fairmont hotels in the U.S. and Canada will give guests a Kobo e-reader when they check-in, for use during their stay.

The Kobo will be pre-loaded with a selection of fiction and non-fiction books from Random House. Guests who check-out a Kobo will also be able to access free books from the Kobo bookstore.

“Travelers do not want to carry heavy books in their luggage and vacations provide the perfect time to relax and catch up on reading,” says Michael Serbinis, CEO of Kobo in a statement. “This partnership allows Kobo to expand our reach and offer our service to an important segment of our customer base.”

The $150 Kobo e-reader has a 6-inch black-and-white E Ink display and launched in March. It is currently available at Borders book stores in the U.S. When Kobo made its debut, it gathered attention because it was much cheaper than the Kindle. But since then, Amazon has cut price on the Kindle with a Wi-Fi only version of the Kindle for $140.

Giving hotel guests a Kobo to play with is an experiment worth watching. Newspapers such as USA Today tapped into hotels successfully to increase their reach and circulation. The same could happen for digital books and e-readers. Those consumers who haven’t had a chance to try e-readers could play with one at a hotel and see if they are comfortable with digital books. And if they do like the experience, they are likely to want the same device they tried, which should be good news for Kobo.

The downside is that the Kobo e-reader at the hotel may not have the books you want.

And as with the bathrobe and the alarm clock in the room, your credit card will be billed if you walk away with the device.

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Photo: Kobo (jivedanson/Flickr)