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Originally Posted by MovieBird
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Originally Posted by DMcCunney
The chap I was talking to thinks textbooks have to be reimplemented to take advantage of the capabilities of things like the iPad. I see the point, but the problem is cost. Creating two separate output formats like that - PDF for printed book and whatever for iPad - will be expensive, and textbooks already cost a lot to produce by the nature of the material.
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I think textbooks just have to go back to the way they were a few decades ago, once a math specification is written into epub.
I looked at some of my mother's old math/computer science books from her university days, and there were no pictures! There was a paragraph, a single equation, a couple paragraphs, a small diagram, etc. To contrast to my undergrad Thermodynamics book, there is a spiffy chapter heading with a colored triangle behind the portion of the chapter (4.4), with color coded text helping me to identify keywords. There are summations of principles in the margins, which are either superfluous in an epub with search, or implemented as a cheat sheet at the back of the book. There are color coordinated examples with pretty line drawings, which could easily be grayscale svgs, and not inline. I'm not sure why I need a "Thermodynamics in the News" section with a picture of a house... |
You are assuming all textbooks are like your mother's comp sci/math texts. They aren't. There are plenty of texts that
must include illustrations, perhaps even in color (medical textbooks, anyone?), and multi-column layouts, footnotes, and sidebars are largely the norm.
Simply adding math to ePub doesn't help you. (And you can include equations now as embedded illustrations.)
When you have something like an iPad, you have the potential in the device for new ways of presenting the material, but it requires a new format for the book. Creating that new format will cost money.
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It would be layed out differently from a big pdf, but all the material could easily be the same. There's simply no need for most of the crap publishers shoehorn into a book on a topic that's over 150 years old (for the undergraduate level). It's just an excuse to charge even more for the same thing.
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Don't you just wish. Not all topics are over 150 years old, and amenable to using an old textbook to cut costs. Some areas change with bewildering rapidity, and a textbook may be out of date (thought still largely usable) when it's published. (Some areas of computer science are notable here.)
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One of my professors told us to use whatever Aerodynamics book we wanted, but he recommended a certain series. He photocopied and posted all the homework questions so we weren't locked into the BS behavior of changing a couple of questions at the back of the chapter and fixing typos to put out a new edition.
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Your professor is certainly an improvement over some I've heard of that mandate a specific book (which is often one they were involved in writing.)
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Dennis