"It's fashionable to hate the LMS. It's the poster child for Enterprise Thinking and lazy (online) pedagogy, so it is easy to rail against the LMS as The Cause of All Educational Evil. The LMS is put into the stocks, and we are expected to stand in the town square and throw rotten fruit at it."
"Without Apple's orchestration of this conspiracy, it would not have succeeded as it did in the Spring of 2010," Cote wrote. "Apple and the Publisher Defendants shared one overarching interest-that there be no price competition at the retail level. Apple did not want to compete with Amazon (or any other ebook retailer) on price; and the Publisher Defendants wanted to end Amazon's $9.99 pricing and increase significantly the prevailing price point for ebooks. With a full appreciation of each other's interests, Apple and the Publisher Defendants agreed to work together to eliminate retail price competition in the ebook market and raise the price of ebooks above $9.99."
Chadron Public Schools have yet to see the cost savings in textbook purchases that was expected from providing iPad tablet computers to all of its high school students.
In discussion of the district's financial position at Monday's school board meeting, Chadron High School principal Jerry Mack told board members that costs for textbooks haven't gone down, even though the books themselves may not be used by students, because of publishers' pricing strategies. "Publishers demand that you purchase the hard copy before you get the digital version," said Mack.
"For some texts, in order to get the digital copy, they require you to get the key first," added technology director Uati Paopao.