I believe these are really dumbed down versions as we have already examined the comparison between the actual print versions of middle school science textbooks from both McGraw and Macmillan and there is no comparison to the richness of the data. The digital versions are significantly less comprehensive in terms of illustration, photographic content, graphic design and typography.
If you've done the comparison and given that I haven't then I'll defer to your opinion. For now.
That said, I still think that downloading chapters will solve size issues as well as give school systems the flexibility to pick and choose from the best content available...assuming that the K-12 textbook companies don't clobber that from the get go.
However, I believe that on the higher ed side both McGraw-Hill and Pearson are testng at per chapter sales through Inkling and Cengage.
But I think that Euro Price includes VAT. Or some other factor. I believe traditionally the Euro price listed tends to equal the dollar listed price, the way we in the US are used to seeing it.
The euro price not only includes VAT, but but also higher distribution and retailing costs, higher take-back costs, and protection against exchange rate uncertainty.
My prediction is $249 -- not $299 -- for the starter iPad mini.
Actually I would have disagree with this assessment. If you have looked at your children's textbooks you might be able to understand that they would contain many gigs worth of data even in their static representation. Add the interactivity and video available through iBooks Author and you won't even fit one equivalent textbook in 8GB. One of two things need to happen in my evaluation. One: the textbooks need to be delivered via a web browser, or two the size of the onboard storage needs to increase dramatically.
It seems people are looking at this from the perspective of high school or post secondary. Sure there are textbooks that clock in at 1-3GB, but these are 1,500+ page books heavy in content. I've downloaded a few iBooks for my kids and you'd be surprised how much information you can cram into 500MB if you're smart about it. I see this as ideal for K-6 and solving a couple big issues people have about giving iPads to kids this young (the cost is half a regular iPad and the tablet is smaller, lighter and easier to handle).
iBooks Author already has the ability to include content from an online source, so that pretty much eliminates the problem of not enough storage anyway.
I see this as ideal for K-6 and solving a couple big issues people have about giving iPads to kids this young (the cost is half a regular iPad and the tablet is smaller, lighter and easier to handle).
I don't disagree entirely however there are still some unanswered questions that school boards need to understand. Apple is not presenting a comprehensive guideline for implementation which leaves IT managers for school districts with a lot of uncertainty. Do the parents own the device, does the classroom own the device, do the kids have the ability to check out the device for home use, does the device stay with the classroom the next year. Who's Apple ID is used to download content, etc.
iBooks Author already has the ability to include content from an online source, so that pretty much eliminates the problem of not enough storage anyway.
Until the source decides not to host the content anymore.
There are lot of unknowns. For example we really don't know which Apple ID is going to be used to download the textbook and trying to integrated it with a different website for quizzes and progress evaluations is just another layer of complexity. The fact that most of the animations in iBooks is already using javascript you could just as easily deliver it within a web browser. I see the iBooks format as a compromised format to appease the publishing companies who have millions invested in hard cover print. The whole thing needs to be delivered over the web in a browser in my opinion.
I'm getting less confident in your assertions.
I haven't looked at the iBooks Author SDK since it launched (HTML5 is not my cuppa tea) but peeking at what others have done since then I now see that others have built a quiz widget that can report results to the teacher.
"iBooks Widget's quiz widget seemed to be a perfect match. This widget creates quizzes with a variety of question types (including multiple choice, text answers, and picture ordering) and report results to the teacher. The student can immediately review which questions he got right, but he cannot modify his answers."
And as near as I can tell from the Inkling sample of Mader's Biology iPad book (chapter 4) appears to have the same content as the print...and in fact if it were not, you'd be completely screwed if you bought the chapters on Inkling as opposed to the whole book from Amazon when the professor cherry picks only one or two chapters from the book for his class.
It strikes me as highly unlikely that "every iPad app" will be unusable, but it doesn't preclude the need to change set font sizes in either books or apps.
Why? It'll be somewhat smaller but not terribly so. Even with my aging eyes I probably won't notice the difference.
Quote:
Why not calm down? It's called Mountain Lion auto-correct. I don't touch a thing.
Then why not fix it? And if you didn't "touch a thing" then ML wouldn't have auto-corrected anything so I'm calling BS given every other quote on here has not be "auto-corrected".
Yeah, I don't get all the harping about "textbook" sizes. If you're not a student you don't need textbooks on it. If you load it up with massive books you'll hit the wall on a 16GB shortly after you did on an 8 GB, and even 32GB wouldn't give you everything you need with the examples given if you put a full course load on it.
It's not for holding your interactive encyclopedias, both your Art History books and that dreary volume your Soc prof wrote and made you buy.
It's like complaining about a banana because it's not crunchy.
I'll check it out, thanks for the info however I doubt it will change my opinion that the content should be delivered by web browser as I am a big proponent of open standards.
Edit: Did you actually read that page? It is all beta and totally undocumented.
I'd say that most won't need more than 8gb for 2 reasons. They'll either be youngsters so won't have loads of stuff on there or they will successfully manage their contents through iCloud meaning you don't need massive storage.
What with Amazon cloud streaming too it's all good.
I'll check it out, thanks for the info however I doubt it will change my opinion that the content should be delivered by web browser as I am a big proponent of open standards.
Half the content delivered by the web browser for my kids requires Flash. Which is what I use the $99 HP touchpad for.
So I'm not sure that web content insures open standards. And you could just go the ePUB 3 route and not iBooks although I believe that ePub 3 support is somewhat spotty at times on iOS.
I also think the Khan Academy is better as an app than directly off the web site for viewing the lessons. If it had the drills on the app too we'd never hit the web site again.
I don't disagree entirely however there are still some unanswered questions that school boards need to understand. Apple is not presenting a comprehensive guideline for implementation which leaves IT managers for school districts with a lot of uncertainty. Do the parents own the device, does the classroom own the device, do the kids have the ability to check out the device for home use, does the device stay with the classroom the next year. Who's Apple ID is used to download content, etc.
A lot of schools have already been deploying the iPad. I haven't done any in-depth research on them, but the few reports I've seen said the results have been promising so far (esp for young kids). It would be interesting to see what decisions they made in regards to device ownership.
However, as to Apple ID it would be the parents. They pay for texts already so why shouldn't they pay for the digitial versions? It's not hard to add your Apple ID to a device and at the end of the school year it's just as easy to "forget" the device. This way content ownership belongs with the family, even if the device is the schools. As to iCloud you create a separate ID for your child so their "progress" follows them independent of the device.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Until the source decides not to host the content anymore.
Really? Who says the book publisher has to host the content? My bet would be on school districts hosting content on their own servers. Hell, it's so easy to set up a server these days that individual schools could have their own, which would eliminate heavy internet traffic for much of the content.
I'd bitch at the school but given they are running all 27" iMacs in the computer labs I'm figuring it's not because they are Apple hostile...it just is what it is.
We all have iPads – a mixture of iPad ones twos and threes.
In our household there are two adults and three teenage kids 12, 14 and 16.
Tonight after the end of the Giants Cardinals game we started a new book Lincoln's Last Days.
We sit around in a group, with one person reading aloud -- and the others following on their own iPads. The reader will periodically handoff the reading to another person. Anyone can stop and ask a question about the meaning of a word, the correct pronunciation or emphasis.
The youngest was at the bottom of his reading and comprehension class a few years ago… Now he is at the top of his class and reads with great confidence!
However, as to Apple ID it would be the parents. They pay for texts already so why shouldn't they pay for the digitial versions? It's not hard to add your Apple ID to a device and at the end of the school year it's just as easy to "forget" the device. This way content ownership belongs with the family, even if the device is the schools. As to iCloud you create a separate ID for your child so their "progress" follows them independent of the device.
How I would do it is to make the app free to download, provide a few sample chapters/drills and then provide access to other content either as in-app purchase OR via a logon on my server.
The school issues each student their own id and password and has access to whatever content they contracted for.
All the quiz results would go to my server and only reported to the student and the associated teacher.
Then the Apple ID is immaterial. As long as you have a school issued id and password you can use a school iPad or your own. Doesn't matter.
Cost could be borne by the parent, school or in our case, the PTA which ponied up the cash for some of the online learning materials.
Why? It'll be somewhat smaller but not terribly so.
You're taking the page and cutting it down to half its size. We could pretend it isn't a problem if the pixels were there to handle it, but they're also quartering the pixels. If the text doesn't get any smaller, things need reformatted. If the text gets smaller, it becomes potentially unreadable.
Then why not fix it? And if you didn't "touch a thing" then ML wouldn't have auto-corrected anything so I'm calling BS given every other quote on here has not be "auto-corrected".
Keep imagining whatever you want to imagine.
Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee
Really? Who says the book publisher has to host the content? My bet would be on school districts hosting content on their own servers. Hell, it's so easy to set up a server these days that individual schools could have their own, which would eliminate heavy internet traffic for much of the content.
Just to be clear, you're not talking about schools each having their own books with their own content (talk about your real fragmentation), just that the schools would host publishers' content locally, right?
In that case, what's the point of the format. May as well just host PDFs of the content locally and download them when you need them. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use of calling out to the Internet from within textbooks.
How I would do it is to make the app free to download, provide a few sample chapters/drills and then provide access to other content either as in-app purchase OR via a logon on my server.
The school issues each student their own id and password and has access to whatever content they contracted for.
All the quiz results would go to my server and only reported to the student and the associated teacher.
Then the Apple ID is immaterial. As long as you have a school issued id and password you can use a school iPad or your own. Doesn't matter.
Cost could be borne by the parent, school or in our case, the PTA which ponied up the cash for some of the online learning materials.
That's another way you could do it. There are lots of possibilities and I don't think it's nearly as hard as some would make it out to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Just to be clear, you're not talking about schools each having their own books with their own content (talk about your real fragmentation), just that the schools would host publishers' content locally, right?
In that case, what's the point of the format. May as well just host PDFs of the content locally and download them when you need them. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use of calling out to the Internet from within textbooks.
They can do both. There's no point in schools re-writing existing standardized textbooks so they can have their own versions so no fragmentation. Likewise there shouldn't be any worry about the major textbook publishers suddenly not making the online content available anymore. However, not all schools (think rural) would have access to reliable high-speed internet. For them local storage would be a viable option. Schools and districts already have a lot of their own content and it would make sense to store their own stuff locally.
There are several reasons for going to the internet for data. You can get updates on information that could possibly change or add additional information as it becomes available. Another example is an English class. I remember the teacher giving us a choice of several books and having us write an essay on one. No need to store everything on the iPad when I'm only going to read one book. Or watch one video. The biggest reason would be for those texts where only some of the content is applicable to the class (and we've all bought those huge textbooks before and ended up using 1/3rd of it).
Bottom line is having content stored in the cloud or off the iPad brings many advantages, and the few problems that might occur are easily avoided.
Comments
What is the [B][I]job[/I][/B] of the iPad mini?
...price, capacity, availability & all else evolves from that!
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
I believe these are really dumbed down versions as we have already examined the comparison between the actual print versions of middle school science textbooks from both McGraw and Macmillan and there is no comparison to the richness of the data. The digital versions are significantly less comprehensive in terms of illustration, photographic content, graphic design and typography.
If you've done the comparison and given that I haven't then I'll defer to your opinion. For now.
That said, I still think that downloading chapters will solve size issues as well as give school systems the flexibility to pick and choose from the best content available...assuming that the K-12 textbook companies don't clobber that from the get go.
However, I believe that on the higher ed side both McGraw-Hill and Pearson are testng at per chapter sales through Inkling and Cengage.
The euro price not only includes VAT, but but also higher distribution and retailing costs, higher take-back costs, and protection against exchange rate uncertainty.
My prediction is $249 -- not $299 -- for the starter iPad mini.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
Actually I would have disagree with this assessment. If you have looked at your children's textbooks you might be able to understand that they would contain many gigs worth of data even in their static representation. Add the interactivity and video available through iBooks Author and you won't even fit one equivalent textbook in 8GB. One of two things need to happen in my evaluation. One: the textbooks need to be delivered via a web browser, or two the size of the onboard storage needs to increase dramatically.
It seems people are looking at this from the perspective of high school or post secondary. Sure there are textbooks that clock in at 1-3GB, but these are 1,500+ page books heavy in content. I've downloaded a few iBooks for my kids and you'd be surprised how much information you can cram into 500MB if you're smart about it. I see this as ideal for K-6 and solving a couple big issues people have about giving iPads to kids this young (the cost is half a regular iPad and the tablet is smaller, lighter and easier to handle).
iBooks Author already has the ability to include content from an online source, so that pretty much eliminates the problem of not enough storage anyway.
Quote:
Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee
I see this as ideal for K-6 and solving a couple big issues people have about giving iPads to kids this young (the cost is half a regular iPad and the tablet is smaller, lighter and easier to handle).
I don't disagree entirely however there are still some unanswered questions that school boards need to understand. Apple is not presenting a comprehensive guideline for implementation which leaves IT managers for school districts with a lot of uncertainty. Do the parents own the device, does the classroom own the device, do the kids have the ability to check out the device for home use, does the device stay with the classroom the next year. Who's Apple ID is used to download content, etc.
Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee
iBooks Author already has the ability to include content from an online source, so that pretty much eliminates the problem of not enough storage anyway.
Until the source decides not to host the content anymore.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
There are lot of unknowns. For example we really don't know which Apple ID is going to be used to download the textbook and trying to integrated it with a different website for quizzes and progress evaluations is just another layer of complexity. The fact that most of the animations in iBooks is already using javascript you could just as easily deliver it within a web browser. I see the iBooks format as a compromised format to appease the publishing companies who have millions invested in hard cover print. The whole thing needs to be delivered over the web in a browser in my opinion.
I'm getting less confident in your assertions.
I haven't looked at the iBooks Author SDK since it launched (HTML5 is not my cuppa tea) but peeking at what others have done since then I now see that others have built a quiz widget that can report results to the teacher.
"iBooks Widget's quiz widget seemed to be a perfect match. This widget creates quizzes with a variety of question types (including multiple choice, text answers, and picture ordering) and report results to the teacher. The student can immediately review which questions he got right, but he cannot modify his answers."
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/26/ibook-lessons-bookwidgets/
And as near as I can tell from the Inkling sample of Mader's Biology iPad book (chapter 4) appears to have the same content as the print...and in fact if it were not, you'd be completely screwed if you bought the chapters on Inkling as opposed to the whole book from Amazon when the professor cherry picks only one or two chapters from the book for his class.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
It strikes me as highly unlikely that "every iPad app" will be unusable, but it doesn't preclude the need to change set font sizes in either books or apps.
Why? It'll be somewhat smaller but not terribly so. Even with my aging eyes I probably won't notice the difference.
Quote:
Why not calm down? It's called Mountain Lion auto-correct. I don't touch a thing.
Then why not fix it? And if you didn't "touch a thing" then ML wouldn't have auto-corrected anything so I'm calling BS given every other quote on here has not be "auto-corrected".
Quote:
Originally Posted by igriv
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Just checked, it has 2GB and claims to store 1100 books. 8GB is pretty plush for an eReader.
#next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Yeah, I don't get all the harping about "textbook" sizes. If you're not a student you don't need textbooks on it. If you load it up with massive books you'll hit the wall on a 16GB shortly after you did on an 8 GB, and even 32GB wouldn't give you everything you need with the examples given if you put a full course load on it.
It's not for holding your interactive encyclopedias, both your Art History books and that dreary volume your Soc prof wrote and made you buy.
It's like complaining about a banana because it's not crunchy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/06/26/ibook-lessons-bookwidgets/
I'll check it out, thanks for the info however I doubt it will change my opinion that the content should be delivered by web browser as I am a big proponent of open standards.
Edit: Did you actually read that page? It is all beta and totally undocumented.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jlandd
It's like complaining about a banana because it's not crunchy.
Well, you should fry them...good point BTW.
They'll either be youngsters so won't have loads of stuff on there or they will successfully manage their contents through iCloud meaning you don't need massive storage.
What with Amazon cloud streaming too it's all good.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
I'll check it out, thanks for the info however I doubt it will change my opinion that the content should be delivered by web browser as I am a big proponent of open standards.
Half the content delivered by the web browser for my kids requires Flash. Which is what I use the $99 HP touchpad for.
So I'm not sure that web content insures open standards. And you could just go the ePUB 3 route and not iBooks although I believe that ePub 3 support is somewhat spotty at times on iOS.
I also think the Khan Academy is better as an app than directly off the web site for viewing the lessons. If it had the drills on the app too we'd never hit the web site again.
Quote:
Half the content delivered by the web browser for my kids requires Flash. Which is what I use the $99 HP touchpad for.
Say no more.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
I don't disagree entirely however there are still some unanswered questions that school boards need to understand. Apple is not presenting a comprehensive guideline for implementation which leaves IT managers for school districts with a lot of uncertainty. Do the parents own the device, does the classroom own the device, do the kids have the ability to check out the device for home use, does the device stay with the classroom the next year. Who's Apple ID is used to download content, etc.
A lot of schools have already been deploying the iPad. I haven't done any in-depth research on them, but the few reports I've seen said the results have been promising so far (esp for young kids). It would be interesting to see what decisions they made in regards to device ownership.
However, as to Apple ID it would be the parents. They pay for texts already so why shouldn't they pay for the digitial versions? It's not hard to add your Apple ID to a device and at the end of the school year it's just as easy to "forget" the device. This way content ownership belongs with the family, even if the device is the schools. As to iCloud you create a separate ID for your child so their "progress" follows them independent of the device.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Until the source decides not to host the content anymore.
Really? Who says the book publisher has to host the content? My bet would be on school districts hosting content on their own servers. Hell, it's so easy to set up a server these days that individual schools could have their own, which would eliminate heavy internet traffic for much of the content.
Quote:
Originally Posted by mstone
Say no more.
I'd bitch at the school but given they are running all 27" iMacs in the computer labs I'm figuring it's not because they are Apple hostile...it just is what it is.
In our household there are two adults and three teenage kids 12, 14 and 16.
Tonight after the end of the Giants Cardinals game we started a new book Lincoln's Last Days.
We sit around in a group, with one person reading aloud -- and the others following on their own iPads. The reader will periodically handoff the reading to another person. Anyone can stop and ask a question about the meaning of a word, the correct pronunciation or emphasis.
The youngest was at the bottom of his reading and comprehension class a few years ago… Now he is at the top of his class and reads with great confidence!
We cannot put a price on this!
Quote:
Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee
However, as to Apple ID it would be the parents. They pay for texts already so why shouldn't they pay for the digitial versions? It's not hard to add your Apple ID to a device and at the end of the school year it's just as easy to "forget" the device. This way content ownership belongs with the family, even if the device is the schools. As to iCloud you create a separate ID for your child so their "progress" follows them independent of the device.
How I would do it is to make the app free to download, provide a few sample chapters/drills and then provide access to other content either as in-app purchase OR via a logon on my server.
The school issues each student their own id and password and has access to whatever content they contracted for.
All the quiz results would go to my server and only reported to the student and the associated teacher.
Then the Apple ID is immaterial. As long as you have a school issued id and password you can use a school iPad or your own. Doesn't matter.
Cost could be borne by the parent, school or in our case, the PTA which ponied up the cash for some of the online learning materials.
Originally Posted by nht
Why? It'll be somewhat smaller but not terribly so.
You're taking the page and cutting it down to half its size. We could pretend it isn't a problem if the pixels were there to handle it, but they're also quartering the pixels. If the text doesn't get any smaller, things need reformatted. If the text gets smaller, it becomes potentially unreadable.
Then why not fix it? And if you didn't "touch a thing" then ML wouldn't have auto-corrected anything so I'm calling BS given every other quote on here has not be "auto-corrected".
Keep imagining whatever you want to imagine.
Originally Posted by EricTheHalfBee
Really? Who says the book publisher has to host the content? My bet would be on school districts hosting content on their own servers. Hell, it's so easy to set up a server these days that individual schools could have their own, which would eliminate heavy internet traffic for much of the content.
Just to be clear, you're not talking about schools each having their own books with their own content (talk about your real fragmentation), just that the schools would host publishers' content locally, right?
In that case, what's the point of the format. May as well just host PDFs of the content locally and download them when you need them. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use of calling out to the Internet from within textbooks.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nht
How I would do it is to make the app free to download, provide a few sample chapters/drills and then provide access to other content either as in-app purchase OR via a logon on my server.
The school issues each student their own id and password and has access to whatever content they contracted for.
All the quiz results would go to my server and only reported to the student and the associated teacher.
Then the Apple ID is immaterial. As long as you have a school issued id and password you can use a school iPad or your own. Doesn't matter.
Cost could be borne by the parent, school or in our case, the PTA which ponied up the cash for some of the online learning materials.
That's another way you could do it. There are lots of possibilities and I don't think it's nearly as hard as some would make it out to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tallest Skil
Just to be clear, you're not talking about schools each having their own books with their own content (talk about your real fragmentation), just that the schools would host publishers' content locally, right?
In that case, what's the point of the format. May as well just host PDFs of the content locally and download them when you need them. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the use of calling out to the Internet from within textbooks.
They can do both. There's no point in schools re-writing existing standardized textbooks so they can have their own versions so no fragmentation. Likewise there shouldn't be any worry about the major textbook publishers suddenly not making the online content available anymore. However, not all schools (think rural) would have access to reliable high-speed internet. For them local storage would be a viable option. Schools and districts already have a lot of their own content and it would make sense to store their own stuff locally.
There are several reasons for going to the internet for data. You can get updates on information that could possibly change or add additional information as it becomes available. Another example is an English class. I remember the teacher giving us a choice of several books and having us write an essay on one. No need to store everything on the iPad when I'm only going to read one book. Or watch one video. The biggest reason would be for those texts where only some of the content is applicable to the class (and we've all bought those huge textbooks before and ended up using 1/3rd of it).
Bottom line is having content stored in the cloud or off the iPad brings many advantages, and the few problems that might occur are easily avoided.