Just as Apple has entered the market for digital music and, more recently, consumer-focused e-books, it appears set to put a digital, interactive spin on the textbook.
"Just as Apple has entered the market for digital music and, more recently, consumer-focused e-books, it appears set to put a digital, interactive spin on the textbook. "
e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says.
"It's indisputable that the Internet has made us smarter.... The range of things you can explore in a day is just fantastic compared to 20 years ago," says David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "There's no question that we feel the Internet has made us better researchers, better thinkers, better writers."
Books "are not the shape of knowledge," he says. "They're a limitation on knowledge." The idea of a single author presenting her ideas "was born of the limitations of paper publishing. It's not necessarily the only way or the best way to think and to write."
"e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says."
"Paperbacks are surely still selling at sky-high rates, but the appeal of having a 'stack' of books crammed into one, slim device is certainly winning over customers."
Major textbook publishers have been making electronic versions of their products for years, but until recently, there hasn't been any hardware suitable to display them.
Apple also released iBooks Author, a new tool meant to lure publishers into creating new content specifically for the iPad education user.
even if an iPad were to last for five years in the hands of students, the e-books plus the iPad would cost more than the hardback textbooks.