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This is all very interesting to me as I used to work in college textbook production. Everything they announced just leaves me with a lot of questions.
iBooks Author - I guess this is aimed toward the self-publishing crowd? Is it going to help the big textbook publishers get their books onto the ipad? Unless it integrates with inDesign, I don't see how it can. I mean, c'mon KEYNOTE integration? That's just lame. But I do think it's neat as a tool to "level the playing field" and allow people to self-publish textbooks. But (print) textbooks must be approved by the state before they can be used in a school curriculum. Does the same apply to ipad textbooks?
$15.99 for a textbook. HOW did they do that? There are a lot of costs (and several years of work) that go into making a textbook, and printing up the books is just one of them. So I'm wondering how they got that price and whether/for how long the publishers are going to go along with that. I guess they have textbooks from the big publishers with books in the store at that price today, but does that mean that they all have to go along with that price to get in the ibookstore?
Oh and I think Apple is both brilliant and scary to lock this market into iPad. I can definitely see a future, very close at hand, when all students will be required to have an ipad in school (and not some other tablet).
eP
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