Quote:
Originally Posted by cHex
While it may be that pTextbooks are economical in spite of this, it won't be a straight 1:5 ratio (assuming a $75 pText is used 5 years vs. a $15 eText). (And of course, some textbooks get used more than 5 years. In highschool I was issued the same Spanish III text my dad's older brother had been issued.)
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Anyone who thinks these iTextbooks will be comparable to currently-used 600+ page classroom textbooks is deluding themselves. These books will be 30,000 to 50,000 word mini-textbooks, equivalent to a few dense chapters of the huge textbooks students are currently loaned to elementary/high school students or bought by college students.
There'll be a lot of self-published and new-indie-company ebooks; McGraw Hill isn't going to give up its current $130 textbook sales to sell them for $15.
If Apple had a line on distributing currently-required college or high-school textbooks as low-price ebooks, they'd be
crowing about that. They don't. They're planning on making a platform for textbooks, which will have to be written from scratch for their platform, and distributed only under their terms--for those few books that have a physical counterpart, students won't be able to buy it on paper, scan it themselves, and use that version instead of also buying the digital version.