September’s around the corner, and students are finishing up summer jobs, and starting to turn their attention to picking up their book selections for the upcoming semesters. I’m sure more than a couple of them are wishing that they could just buy all their books on the App Store so they could load them up on their iPads and be done with it. Waiting in line at student bookstores in September is the worst.
Textbook publishers seem to be taking their sweet time getting content on the AppStore, but they aren’t completely absent. Inkling has brought four “best-selling” textbooks from McGraw-Hill to the device, on the topics of Biology, Economics, Marketing, and Psychology. The interesting thing is that the text books are being sold starting at a whopping $70 per book or $3 per chapter, as an in app purchase. It’s highway robbery. To be fair, the price of the digital books are somewhat discounted over the traditional print versions.
The text books do include a lot of multimedia content, including video lectures and 3D models. This, in addition to the ability to share notes with other students, are impressive additions to textbooks, but by far the most important thing they could have done is offering the $3 per chapter purchase option. There’s been way too many times where I’ve wasted $80 on a textbook only to have a professor use it for one chapter. The pay per chapter model could be huge with students and professors if this takes off.
We’re going to take a textbook for a test drive, and give you a guys a full review in the upcoming week, so stay tuned for that.
Article Via MacNN
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