new digital textbooks

 mediashift reporting:
..... CourseSmart is already there when it comes to pricing. Five major educational publishers joined in 2007 to start the company, which provides more than 90 percent of the e-textbooks in use today. Students save up to 60 percent by subscribing to a text for a semester versus buying a new book, and CourseSmart has tried to reward their investment by adding the ability to take notes, search by keyword, highlight text, and email passages to classmates. But the e-books are still faithful replicas of their print counterparts, meaning they look and read the same way and are updated at the same slow pace.
CourseSmart has a good reason for this, as a spokeswoman explained in an email: "While e-textbook adoption is growing rapidly, many students still prefer print textbooks and this makes page fidelity crucial. CourseSmart enables all students, whether they are using a digital or print edition, to literally be on the same page."
...The idea is to think of e-textbooks more like software than online books. Throw out the concept of a book altogether and develop movable, interactive units that can be updated whenever necessary, just like an operating system or mobile app. The concept isn't entirely new, but the emergence of the tablet, especially the iPad, makes it much more feasible. A decent tablet provides the immediacy and portability of a book, the interactivity and multimedia experience of a computer, and at $500, the cost of what the average college student pays for a semester's worth of textbooks.

Inkling of the Future
A San Francisco startup called Inkling is banking on that pitch, at least. The company is rolling out more than 100 higher education "titles" (they don't call them books) via tablets this fall semester and hopes to see them take hold with college instructors and students. Inkling works with publishers to adapt print textbooks for tablets, a six- to 12-week process that turns linear, static chapters into modules with interactive graphics, video and web links, highlighting and note-taking functions, and a learning network in which students can converse about what they're viewing. Whole titles sell for about 20 to 40 percent less than their print versions, or individual chapters can be purchased for $2.99 to $16.99, depending on the book. The buyer owns the content outright versus temporarily subscribing to it.
Academic publishers are seeing the potential of Inkling and similar providers like ScrollMotion and MindTap, and I am too. Imagine reading a book chapter about journalism's watchdog role in American history. Then imagine sprinkling that reading with video of President Nixon's resignation speech, the Supreme Court's judgment in the Pentagon Papers case, or an exchange with fellow students about whether it's worth going to jail to protect a whistle-blower's identity.
Now -- and here is the part that most intrigues me -- imagine the publisher updating that chapter to include WikiLeaks and the new levels of access to and scrutiny of our government that it represents. The addition takes however long the writing and editing take, with no production delay to worry about. In Inkling's world, much like McAdams' imagined one, updates can be made at will, whenever the publisher deems them..
"The Inkling platform can push an update out to an iPad at any moment," said Matt MacInnis, Inkling's founder and CEO. "The student gets a badge saying there's an update available and would you like it. It's more like a website than a book."necessary
.http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/08/how-e-textbooks-online-modules-could-keep-journalism-education-current237.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pbs%2Fmediashift-blog+%28mediashift-blog%29