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Destroy the public good? Without Apple, there would be no tablet market. Apple has created a tool to make it easy to create the kind of interactive text books that many companies have tried AND FAILED to make economically viable before.
Standardization comes AFTER innovation. Apple is blazing a trail here. A trail that doesn't exist yet. A trail that STILL might not succeed. Apple has placed a multi million dollar bet.
Even with the iPad and the iBooks Authoring tool and the cooperation of the 3 publishers that control 90% of the high school text book market....Apple still has an upward battle on it's hands. Getting school systems to buy into this plan is going to be the toughest component.
And what are folks whining about? That Apple hasn't given away all that it's investing in to it's competitors so that customers who want the benefit of all of Apple's efforts, can give their money to Apple's competitors instead.
Apple isn't evil for wanting a return on it's investment. Apple isn't evil for not giving away it's intellectual property to it's competition. Let us conveniently ignore that Apple developed the webkit code that ALL mobile web browsers now use...free of charge as open source. Clearly, most of what Apple does Apple does not give away.
But so what? If Apple didn't do what Apple does there'd be no tablet market to begin with and we wouldn't be talking about the advent of low cost yet highly interactive text books.
Lee
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