Major textbook publishers have been making electronic versions of their products for years, but until recently, there hasn’t been any hardware suitable to display them. PCs are too expensive and cumbersome to be good e-book machines for students. Dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle have small screens and can’t display color. IPads and other tablet computers work well, but iPads cost at least $499.
All this means textbooks have lagged behind the general adoption of e-books, even when counting college-level works that students buy themselves. Forrester Research said e-books accounted for only 2.8 percent of the $8 billion US textbook market in 2010.
Pearson PLC of Britain and McGraw-Hill Cos. of New York are two of the three big companies in the US textbook market. The third, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston, also plans to supply books to Apple’s store, but none were immediately available.
The new textbooks are legible with a new version of the free iBooks application, which became available yesterday.
The textbooks will cost $15 or less, said Phil Schiller, Apple’s head of marketing. He unveiled the books at an event at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Schools will be able to buy the books for its students and issue redemption codes to them.
Albert Greco, a professor of marketing at Fordham University in New York, and a former high school principal, said schools would need to buy iPads for its students if they were to replace printed books.
It wouldn’t work to let students who can afford to buy their own iPads use them in class with textbooks they buy themselves, alongside poorer students with printed books.
“The digital divide issue could be very embarrassing,“ Greco said. “Because if you don’t have the iPad, you can’t do the quiz, you don’t get instant feedback . . . that’s an invitation for a lawsuit.’’
