Why You Shouldn’t Get Too Excited About Apple’s iBooks 2 Textbooks

NOTE: Check out my follow-up to this post: E-Textbooks In iBooks 2 Won’t Catch On Anytime Soon

Now that Apple has released iBooks 2, which is enhanced for e-textbooks, everyone is excited about how this new feature will revolutionize learning. My advice: Don’t get too excited, at least, not yet.

Yes, the new iBooks 2 is very impressive. I’ll give it that. But there’s a huge difference between being “impressive” and being “practical” in the real world.

How dare I question Apple’s innovation! Just hear me out. I’m predicting e-textbooks aren’t going to catch on anytime soon. Here’s why.

Not Everyone Has an iPad

In order for a textbook on the iPad to be truly useful in the classroom, all the students have to have one. It does no good for some students to be using an iPad while others are thumbing through their paper textbooks with pages ripped or missing. This is even more important if the teacher/professor writes their own textbook. Apple has created a Mac app called iBooks Author, allowing anyone to create enhanced ebooks.

This is not just a logistical problem, but one of that crosses into the realm of socio-economic inequality in the classroom. As I said before, not every student has an iPad. The students that can afford to buy one will be sitting among those who can’t. Let’s face it, iPads are expensive.

You might be thinking: “Hey, why doesn’t just the school or college give an iPad to all the students? Problem solved!” Yes. That is one way to solve the problem. But someone still has to buy all those iPads. In colleges, this is easy enough: Add the cost of the iPad to the student’s tuition. What’s another $400 added to a $50,000 tuition bill.

High schools are a little tougher. Some schools can barely afford to pay their teachers, much less buy cool electronics for all their students. Even if the school only let the students borrow the iPad for the semester/school year, it’s still pretty damned expensive.

And probably the biggest hurdle of all for these schools: The students themselves. Let’s face it, high schoolers aren’t the most sophisticated creatures to roam this planet. They have a habit of defacing school desks with wads of gum and drawing and writing vulgarities in school textbooks.

Issuing iPads to high schoolers is taking a risk. While they can’t draw wee-wees and hoo-hoo-dillies on an iPad (unless they’re loaded with some kind of drawing app) like they can in print textbooks, students can do some damage. iPads are prone to being broken by getting dropped too many times, dunked in the toilet, and thrown at the teacher for a bad grade.

My point is simple: Getting an iPad in the hands of every student is much easier said than done. If not all students can afford one, then the school would have to ensure everyone is issued an iPad.

No Universal Ebook Format

Another reason why I don’t think the iBooks 2 textbooks will catch on is because there are too many different ebook formats. We must consider that the iPad isn’t the only tablet in town. There are a lot of other tablets on the market, each with a different OS.

This poses a problem for publishers; they have to publish their e-textbooks in multiple formats. We need a universal ebook format that is a one-size-fits all standard.

The same e-textbooks should be available in the same format for the iPad, Kindle Fire, Nook Tablet and all the other tablet computers out there. That’s the only way we’ll e-textbooks really skyrocket in popularity.

It’s Not All Doom and Gloom

Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m not dissing the iPad. I’m a proud iPad owner and I love it more than life itself. I’m scraping my pennies together so I can buy the iPad 3 when it comes out this year. I’m even considering selling a kidney on the black market to finance my gadget addiction.

I just think that a lot of new technology gets over-hyped. People don’t look behind the shiny new features of a cool app or device. Yes, iBooks 2 is a cool app, but it’s far from being a mainstream educational tool.

I am predicting that the market will iron these problems out, and within a decade or two we’ll see students using electronic textbooks as the rule, not the exception.

Until then, students will be forced to learn from stinky used textbooks filled with dirty limericks and bad drawings.

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