Tuaw's Chris Rawson wrote yesterday:
The announcement this morning that textbooks would be sold through the iBookstore wasn't especially surprising. But the price was; full-featured multimedia electronic textbooks being offered for no more than US$15 is exactly the kind of disruptive shakeup the industry needed.
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[W]hy the lower prices? AllThingsD asked that question of McGraw-Hill CEO Terry McGraw, and it turns out to have a simple answer. Schools will usually hold onto the paper versions of textbooks for about five years, meaning the publishers are only recouping about $15 per year anyway. Via the iBookstore, textbooks can be sold directly to students (who may or may not be offered payment vouchers from their schools), and from the publishers' perspective, the beauty of this arrangement is that those books can't be re-used or re-sold.
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That price drop is a big deal to me and my wife. This past summer, we decided to home school our eldest son*. Being the uber-geek that I am, I have been keeping a sharp eye out for how to leverage technology in order to give my son a great eduction. Apple's announcement is pretty huge for my wife and I as it hopefully means that we will be able to purchase quality textbooks for our son at prices that are easy on our budget.
The fact that all of this is happening on the iPad excites me as well. My wife and I are on the front end of being Digital Natives**. We grew up with computers and gained easy access to the internet in high school and college. However, the contrast we see between us and our kids, who learned to use iOS at 18 months and don't understand how limiting live TV is, is huge. They interface with the world is such a different way that we need to change the way we do education. I'm excited to see how Apple pushes forward innovation in that space.
* The reasons for our decision to home school are outside the scope of this post, but feel free to ask me about it if you are interested. Briefly, I can tell you it was a long, thorough and careful process where we considered not just our son's education, but his social development and our family circumstances as well. I know some people who were home schooled as kids and turned out strange. I know some who turned out just fine. We aren't crazed zealots about it, and we strongly believe it isn't for everyone. If you are considering it, I encourage you to read up on both sides of the argument and to talk to people who have gone through that process.
** If you want to read more about Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants, in addition to Marc Prensky's original paper, I recommend googling for Seth Godin's thoughts on education, art and the Post-Industrial Revolution.
