Man I wish I had invested in Apple a couple of years ago there on fire.

RE Apple “reinventing” the textbook market: please. Apple is an old media company that sells new devices – they deliver their old media to these new devices over a closed distribution network.

The thing is, there’s this other distribution network that is more open (at least for now) that’s called the internet. I thiink it might catch on

So much for individual responsibility huh?

Unfortunately, so many of the younger generation already don’t know how to spell, nor can they even make a complete sentence, thanks to texting, automatic spelling, etc.  They also can’t read as well as they should….just my observations….somehow, I don’t see this as a good idea for our young people in the long run.

And our neo Luddite President will likely bemoan the demise of the bookbinder industry.

Awesome.Pretty soon we can all learn at home and not even have to go to school.

Kusokurae, first of all, if studying a college textbook on an iPad is considered a “distraction”, I have to question your motives; it sounds like you’re personally going to lose out.
You seem to also think that students don’t lose textbooks – which strikes me as pretty funny.
Also, iPads prices are coming down; if you think you have to drop 1/2 a grand, keep shopping.
“According to an estimate by the College Board, the average undergraduate will spend $1,137 on textbooks annually.”  (http://www.dailycampus.com/news/pirg-protests-high-textbook-prices-1.2576891#.TyLnjFbfIzk) – a 2011 figure.  If (after the purchase of an iPad), textbooks cost 1/3rd as much, you will save a significant amount as you obtain your four year degree.  And you get an iPad too with all those annoying “distractions”.

I’m sorry, but other than lab textbooks (which you would need to buy anyway as a hard copy), textbooks are for reading and studying.  If they “can’t read as well as they should”, what does it matter if the text is in a book or on an iPad?

Also, unlike many textbooks, the iPad textbooks can easily be kept up-to-date.

I’m a homeschool dad and we use technology and books.  We see great benefits from both but the “it” factor of the technology gets all of the attention.  Two of many examples are khanacademy.org and udacity.com.  My 12 year old son has now seen Tom Woods speak twice…at Indiana University and a few weeks ago at the Houston Mises seminar.  We didn’t get a chance to introduce ourselves because he’s such a rock star there was always a huge crowd around him!  Homeschooling is a great lifestyle.

the college bubble is popping.  the deflating hiss is music to my ears.

My crotchety old man alarm is dinging. Text books in the hard sciences tend not to be “read” so much as flipped through quickly, usually involving four fingers holding four different places simultaneously, while a complicated formula is worked through. This also involved more than one text book being open at the same time (IE lots of iPads). I’ve tried to do this on a palm one “life drive” and it wasn’t such a success. -Early e-book adopter on Palm IIIc.

This is great news.  Hopefully the market will also bring new sense by accepting associates degrees, at most, in many fields where the candidate has proven himself competent.  Also, apprenticeships that provide mentors and on-the-job training make much more economic sense for both employer and employee.  There is much entrepreneurship to be built if the government would get out of the way, and peacefully allow people to conduct their lives.

I work as a reporter for a community newspaper in Washington State, and one of the things we’ve been looking at is how the local school districts are using the latest technology, such as iPads and the Internet, to educate students. Several of the middle schools issue a laptop to their students, and this year the high schools are now issuing them to the freshmen. Universities, however, are always the slowest to adapt to new changes in educating, so it will be fascinating to see how this plays out over the next several years. 

The iPad and Kindles could ultimately be as devastating to the higher education institutions in this country as the light bulb was to the candle industry. Hopefully, it will finally end the days of overpriced text books, cozy tenures, and relaxed curriculum standards and force them to actually compete for students. 

Hopefully this will come to Android Tablets as well.

This why the free market is always superior to the government in protecting the end consumer

You’re spot on with regard to Luddism.  I don’t know yet if the protectionism is also a consideration.  

Fetz

The fact that a business finds it very cheap to weed people out of their hiring process by seeing if they can ‘properly’ appeal to authority (by seeing if they have a degree or not.)

tz is back with his usual nonsense about libertarians; he ignores every reply I make.

Yes, I can calculate percentages. But here’s a wild speculation: more of them might sell at $15 than at $200. If I were an author and I could take 10% of $200 or 70% of $15, I’d grab the latter in a second. So would anyone who bothered to think about it.

I wouldn’t say game over, Tom if you anything about tech that’s far from the truth, especially considering that Apple plagues their products with DRM.  Also many of the e-books have DRM which will limits the use of ebooks in terms of reproducing it, and that will inflate the price of ebooks.  I wouldn’t trust anything with Apple.  None the less, this is better than the government altervative of buying over-priced textbooks and carrying it in your backpack.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-drm.htm

No, they’ll find ways to protect their monopoly (or whatever it is).  

This ALMOST makes me want to get an IPAD.

Ha, I get sick of paying for these worthless textbooks.

The only reason to buy a textbook is because your university profrssor requires it and that is typicallu from a a cartel.  No one I know voluntarily buys a textbook, and $200 can bribe more professors to insist on this years edition in physical media.  If I would give you a kickback of $20 per student for requiring a mind-numbingly boring textbook every student in your class would be required to buy (giving $20 to the author), or you could require a public domain work on the internet, – and assuming you were greedy – self interested and unaccountable – what would you require?

You’ve neither noted Apple’s terms (have you read them?), nor said anything about whether IP itself is valid – is Kinsella right or wrong?  One of my difficulties is non-libertarians who point to Kinsella as being the dogma of libertarianism.

Libertarians comprise everything from anarcho-capitalists to regime-libertarians.  You can speak for yourself, but you have not made a distinction as to whether you reject any sub-division, consider all valid no matter the contradictions, or something else.  I can’t tell as you have not declared, or you have implied in some works the Constitution itself is tyrannical but support Ron Paul – but havent said it was a pragmatic compromise of the lesser evil.

Thanks for that link. 

As Ihnatko notes, Apple requires not only that you sell your product ONLY through Apple, but that Apple vets it as it does apps. So, you might receive a rejection from Apple after doing work for months or years and be SOL.  Apple might think your work is not useful, or maybe it will decide that the content is not acceptable. (For instance, maybe the author thinks that Lincoln was a tyrant and the Civil War unjustified. Or maybe Apple won’t approve Walter Block’s defense of pimps.) One distributor with veto power, potentially subject to political pressure, is not to my liking. If Apple gains large market share, could that not reduce the diversity of ideas fostered by traditional printing? It is not enough to say that one could also design the same product for other methods of distribution: that is prohibitively expensive.

Imagine the frequent and ferocious skirmishes over K-12 textbooks being laid at Apple’s door. How will Apple deal with the typical scenario of politically powerful government committees determining which textbook, reflecting which POV, will be the ONLY one chosen for use? What Texas or California picks often determines what the rest of the country uses. Maybe Apple will break that cartel, but that is far from certain. I’m confident that it is not in Apple’s interest to be the focus of endless attacks by interest groups wanting their POV to prevail.

For one, professors having the absolute authority to dictate which textbook you get to read in and of itself is not monopolistic. If yo don’t like his prescriptions, you get to take another course. None of that changes with the iPad textbooks except that it becomes cheaper to get to read whatever text your professor prescribes. The question “is apple eating the textbook publisher monopoly good or bad” is irrelevant. Choice for consumers is always better than no choice. Will consumers like apple’s products better than traditional textbooks is something no one can say with any certainty until they have actual consumer behavioral statistics because, if there is anything mises taught us, it is that consumer tastes are fundamentally unpredictable and historical information regarding consumer behavior in a particular case is just that, historical information. It neither guarantees future behavior or predicts specific outcomes but only helps our understanding of the process.