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

Tablets make digital textbooks cool on campus

 CNBC reporting:

The Inkling digital books use the touch technology on the Apple iPad to allow students to interact with the text, and other content. The students can digitally highlight material and make notes, in the same they would with a pen, but then those notes can be shared with others in the class.

"If I understand something and my friend doesn't, I can help explain to it to her and it reinforces it to me," says freshman Courtney Richardson. "You obviously can't get that in a traditional textbook."

For associate professor Ian Shepherd, the students' notes in the text provided real-time feedback on what they were absorbing in class and what they were missing.

"It allows me to focus on coming up with a new application that perhaps is more relevant to a student," he says. "It has reinvigorated my love for teaching."

ACU students were given the iPads for this year's pilot program. After using them, three-quarters of freshman say they'd be willing to buy their own tablets, if at least half of their textbooks were available on the iPad.

A national study from the Pearson Foundation also found students with tablets overwhelmingly prefer digital texts, the first sign of students embracing e-books in a couple of years of the college surveys.

...

While students in college today are very attached to their mobile devices, they have not been enamored of e-books. In 2010, digital books accounted for just 3 percent of textbooks sales according to the National Association of College Stores.

Analysts say it's because until now e-textbooks have been little more little more than PDF copies of physical books, impractical for students who are accustomed to highlighting their paper copies as they study.

Researchers at online education firm Xplana say the shift toward tablets in the year ahead will jumpstart demand for e-texbooks in the $8 billion U.S. education book market.

"iPads and other tablets will be in the possession of about 20 percent of college students by the fall of 2012," says Xplana director of research Rob Reynolds. "That's a huge impact. It's fastest growing technology that we've seen in education."

Reynolds predicts digital book sale growth in the higher education market

will double over the next four years to $1.5 billion by 2015, and account for 25 percent market share.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2011-06-17-digital-textbooks_n.htm

EReading Pilot Project – The iPad and Reading and Writing Practices

Duke CIT/Randy Riddell reporting:
Preliminary findings also indicate that ereading does have some positive impact on scholarly reading practices, but has a negative impact on scholarly writing practices. In my own usage, I found the reading of pdfs and books considerably more efficient on the iPad because it was more portable and I could organize my annotations more easily than in print. Taking quick notes was extremely easy, and this proved incredibly helpful during administrative meetings, conferences, and making notes in class about variety of ideas. Writing, however, in a sustained way, was quite burdensome on the iPad, even with the external keyboard. The features of iPad applications were not yet as sophisticated as word processing capabilities on the computer.
This disjuncture between the iPad’s usefulness for reading and difficulty with writing bring to mind questions about how we define writing. To my mind, writing is all too often conceived of as occurring at a unified moment in time, writing up data findings, or pulling an all nighter to get a term paper done. Writing is also too often defined as long projects. A case could be made, though, that writing happens across long lengths of time, in little pockets of thinking, and that the little notes and ideas one may jot down at random times throughout a day are just as significant as those moments of longer, sustained writing. In a way, then, the iPad encouraged me as a writer to capture my thoughts in a succinct way and let them percolate for a while until I had time to expand, abandon, or adapt them later at my computer.
http://cit.duke.edu/2011/06/ereading-pilot-project-the-ipad-and-reading-and-writing-practices