Whether Apple is waiting for success in the market of educational books

Three days ago, Apple introduced its publishing system to the world along with an application, or, as they say now, a whole ecosystem, for educational books. The demonstration and marketing part was done perfectly, in full accordance with the style of Apple. The presentation and the products themselves are traditionally honed, the example of the Life On Earth textbook causes a constant wow-effect, the slogans are also traditionally hyperbolic. Let's see how new products bring us closer to a brighter future in education.

I love e-books and strive for their popularization in the educational process. Moreover, this is my business. For me, any “entry” of a major player on the market is almost a holiday (I remember how hard it was to explain the advantages of e-books to publishers and inexperienced readers before Kindle came out). The powerful machine of a large corporation retains the vocal chords of small players. The most curious thing is that today everyone understands everything: about the weight of school bags, about the possibilities of electronic textbooks, and so on. They do not understand only one thing: how to implement this thing. Will it succeed Apple? I'm afraid not. Apple introduced another incarnation of the platform for publishing content on i-devices, which is not suitable for a universal system for education for several reasons.

First, the expected closeness of the platform. One can argue for a long time about the ideality of the iPad as an educational machine (in fact, as such, there are no less flaws in it than obvious advantages), but not all students buy tablets, and of those who buy tablets, not all buy iPads. Some private wealthy colleges may provide them to students centrally along with a set of educational materials, but the vast majority of educational institutions will have to take into account the whole variety of laptops, netbooks and tablets in the classrooms.

Worse, supporters of budgetary “centralized procurement” (they say, we buy a batch for students, and then only buy more each year, saving a lot of money) forgetfully that these are gadgets with a very limited lifespan. Let Apple devices look more profitable against the background of the rest, changing the model almost every few months, but also the “end of life” they have a hard and declarative. There is no doubt that in the end version of iTunes 12 will require only a version of iBooks 4, which will only work on iPad 5 (do not catch on numbers, they are just for example).
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The program of layout of interactive books iBooks Author allows you to publish books only through Appstor, which excludes Samsung users, asus and other dormouse users from the process. Moreover, the iBooks Author license prohibits selling books in any other way (except for free distribution in PDF format), which is a tightening even in comparison with the strict limits of the app store: Apple does not interfere with sales of applications on other platforms (imagine that the creators of Angry Birds did not have the right to sell their netlenk neither on androids, nor on windows, nor on smart coffee makers), and in books trying to impose such a restriction.

Preparation and layout of electronic books is still the most problematic and time-consuming task. Authors, publishing houses and educational institutions will prefer to use open standards to maximize audience coverage and, consequently, maximize profits when it comes to commercial textbooks. Let today's book formats are far from perfect, but tying to a specific hardware-commercial platform is the path to nowhere. What is the result? A convenient, pleasant system for a closed club of consumers of i-devices - yes. Global, universal system for e-books in education - no.

Separately, I would like to touch on the issue of interactivity. I really do not like modern fashion, trying to make interactive books synonymous with educational. They try to replace the essence with an external effect, to which even experienced teachers peck, and this is wrong, in my humble opinion. That's what's interesting: I read hundreds of reviews about the Life On Earth demo tutorial. “Flies!”, “Doesn't slow down!”, “How smoothly!”, “Lots of pictures / slides / media!”. And not a single comment: “What an interesting book!”, “What a good tutorial!”. I exaggerate a little, but the idea, I hope, is clear.

Illustrations certainly complement the training material, make it richer and more accessible, but too many pictures and clips have the opposite effect. In the commercial, the girl does not learn - she is having fun . Tap on the pictures. Of course, I don’t expect a thoughtful video ad to turn the pages once every half hour, but all the described advantages, all slogans revolve around these pictures and smooth scrolling! From the point of view of the textbook, it would be right to place other accents, offhand: how formulas are displayed (from my still short acquaintance with iBooks Author there is no support for MathML in it), footnotes (usually there are a lot of them in textbooks), indexes, glossaries, dictionaries, notes (the last ones, however, are slightly shown in the clip), is there an opportunity to do exercises and tests. Instead, we see the version a la “New York Times” at the time of the announcement of Ipad. Handsomely? Handsomely. But where are the textbooks?

Of course, a clear answer to the question of the benefits or harm of super-interactivity of textbooks does not exist. The more interesting will be the discussion and opinion of the social community.