Last week Tulane hosted a number of innovative companies that are using technology to improve higher education during Tulane Tech Week! On Wednesday, September 24, I joined a group of professors and faculty in a workshop led by Apple. It was called “Content Curation and Creation with iBooks and iTunes U.” Once the workshop began I realized it was definitely more geared towards faculty, but I grabbed a free muffin and took a seat where a Tech Week notebook and a raffle ticket (for an iPod mini!) awaited me.
The presenter, Lynnwood Belvin, has been with Apple for over a year now. Before that, however, he was a professor at Berry College in Georgia which made him super relatable as a speaker for Tulane faculty about the higher ed innovations Apple has to offer.
During the first hour, Belvin introduced us to Apple’s free e-book app “iBook” and the ease with which one can publish using “iBook Author.” While I’m not a professor looking to produce a book, the implications of such technology on my life as a student were immediately evident. “We can solve the problem of students weeping as they walk through the bookstore in September,” Belvin said. “iTunes disrupted the music industry. The publishing industry is next.”
With “iBooks Author,” professors can publish more than just textbook content with extreme ease and at the ultimate price of zero dollars! The app is as simple as dragging and dropping content into pre-formatted templates. This content can range from text to movies, PowerPoint Presentations, and chapter review quizzes. Belvin explained that once you’re working with iBooks, getting the necessary learning content is just a matter of “dragging” from your lecture files and “dropping” into your iBook project. Professors are now able to sell their books on iTunes and receive 70% of the funding, or they can offer their books for free!
You may be wondering, ‘What’s the catch?’ If Apple is truly going to disrupt the publishing industry, why am I only hearing about it now, in this blogpost? Belvin and the other Apple representative at our presentation tried to sweep this under the rug whenever the question came up, but there is indeed a major catch to this disruptor. In order to create, curate, and access content on iBook you must have an Apple brand iPad or computer. Belvin used the term “BYOD, bring your own device” to get the message home.
What’s more is Apple does not foresee this technology being made available to non-Apple brand devices now or ever. That is to say, this big disruption Apple anticipates iBook Author will bring to the publishing industry, it is contingent on the fact that Apple first “disrupts” the personal computer/tablet industry. The following is an infographic from 2011:
If the ultimate benefit of iBooks will be increased access to educational content and not at the sky-high textbook prices students are accustomed to. But that would first require all of personal computer and tablet consumers to start buying Apple products, which are generally the most expensive on the market.
To be fair, Belvin presented to us about the success of iBook on campuses like Jackson State University in Mississippi where Apple provided all students with their products. In these utopian situations, in which everyone is given a free tablet and professors share free textbooks with their students to engage with on these tablets, it’s easy to see the great potential iBooks have to disrupt the publishing industry. However, the real world will take a little bit more convincing.
For more information on this topic, check out these articles:
Huffington Post 2014, 10 Reasons Self Published Authors Will Capture 50 Percent of the Ebook Market by 2020
Huffington Post 2014, Where is the Netflix for University Textbooks?
The Economist 2012, A Textbook Manoeuvre