I have no idea what you're talking about.

/Goes back to playing angry birds.

FTA: The study, conducted at Amelia Earhart Middle School...

For some reason this makes the Angry Birds reference that much funnier

/...

sirgrim: Vacation Bible School: FTA: The study, conducted at Amelia Earhart Middle School...

For some reason this makes the Angry Birds reference that much funnier

I sure hope they're not teaching these kids how to fly.

Maybe they need the iPads so the kids can play Flight Control.

Thursday on NPR, I heard an Apple shill saying that an iPad was more durable than a textbook. Drop a textbook onto concrete from 4 feet, then drop a textbook, then get back to me.

Five Minute Standup: Drop a textbook onto concrete from 4 feet, then drop a textbook, then get back to me.

The same one? I'm pretty sure they would both be unharmed

A company that sells something says it's product is awesome.

I am shocked and surprised by this.

How do IPads work with recovering apps if you get a new one/break one?

I imagine many college kids would love the idea of not lugging around a hundred pounds of books. I'd hate to lose a few grand worth of books because I lost my IPad though.

How easy are these to pirate? I could see that totally killing these guys.

(Convince Schools To ) Buy Open Source Textbooks

I'm stealing the headline.

Most likely because school districts that have parents that can afford to give iPads to their kids tend to be more well-funded.

You'd be amazed at how well kids grades increase when they don't have to worry about stray gunfire or sneaking home enough crackers from the lunchroom to bring home for dinner.

I actually used Angry Birds as an example in a physics lab report, so I'm getting a kick and all.

I'm waiting for open source textbooks to emerge. Traditional textbook makers are going to get hurt as badly as the newspaper business once schools start to realize that they don't need to pay a fortune for 'revised' editions every few years in subjects such as history and math, and can just give the kids downloaded digital versions.

"Open source textbooks"? Don't you mean DRM-free textbooks? Unless these textbooks are binaries compiled from some sourcecode...

NickelP: How do IPads work with recovering apps if you get a new one/break one?.

Turn on the new one, enter your Apple ID, and all your shiat gets downloaded.

The study, conducted at Amelia Earhart Middle School in Riverside, California, saw 78% students taking the course using the iPad textbook rank as "Proficient" or "Advanced" in the subject, compared to only 58% of students using the traditional print textbook.

Not saying this is what they did, but I'm implying it: were I theoretically to falsify a study for the purposes of legitimizing the use of bribery to create an artificial market for my product, I would take advantage of the well-known fact that students perform notably better when tests are presented in formats similar to the presentation of the lectures, and simply made sure that the shared test was an interactive, computer-based one.

Obviously not on my actual product, that would be TOO obvious, but similar in format on a different computer system or, hell, on paper and just formulated in a similar way to the practice problems in the interactive booklets.

//In the end it's going to come down to whether the students give a fark or not more than anything else regardless of textbook format.

There is no way I'd get any legit studying done on one of those things. Glad I'm done with school.

A mediocre teacher requires a textbook and one with the answers in the back

A good teacher requires a textbook

A great teacher does not even know that the school issued textbook looks like

sirgrim: Vacation Bible School: FTA: The study, conducted at Amelia Earhart Middle School...

For some reason this makes the Angry Birds reference that much funnier

I sure hope they're not teaching these kids how to fly.

What does a Holocaust victim have to do with flight?

Burr: Five Minute Standup: Drop a textbook onto concrete from 4 feet, then drop a textbook, then get back to me.

The same one? I'm pretty sure they would both be unharmed


(facepalm).

Anyway, after you've dropped that textbook the second time, drop an iPad.

I can see how using software is more educational than a textbook for science and math. If you can take an example and tweak it and see the results in real time, it's a lot easier to understand the concept.

theurge14: "Open source textbooks"? Don't you mean DRM-free textbooks? Unless these textbooks are binaries compiled from some sourcecode...

In this context, "open source" can be interpreted to mean material compiled from works in the public domain and those available under Creative Commons licenses and similar terms.

/ I A N A L

while I encourage the digitization of textbooks, I hope it will be in a way that won't monopolize on it. It would be great if it was something like those free MIT classes posted online

so no possible correlation that kids going to a school wealthy enough to all have ipads do better than average?

I think we should be a little more blatant about things;

Let's take the American education system and re-vamp it. Those children whose parents can feed them on a regular basis and make more than the national median income get to go to regular school. Everyone else gets to go to 'serf school' where they learn to enjoy their station in life, and how to worship the middle and upper classes that are their rightful masters.

We can even shave off the stupid girls from the upper class and add them to the stupid girls from the lower class and put them into a third school, where they can learn to be proper worthless whores who can be raped, beaten and dominated by the boys of our neo-utopian society, so when our leaders feel the need to philander, they can have a ready supply of dumb, pliant, sterilized poon-tang into which they can dump their nasty business. This will have the additional benefit of providing a solution to the abortion problem, since it'll be impossible for these women to conceive, since they'll be sterilized with permo-IUDs at 13 or 14. The more troublesome of these girls can actually experience a painless, cost-free lobotomy so that they can enjoy their life without the worries of emotional pain or shame or any of those nasty feelings that lead such prized pieces of snatch to kill themselves before they turn ugly or turn 30.

How bout that? We can just institutionalize the prejudices of the 1% just like that.

scottydoesntknow: NickelP: How do IPads work with recovering apps if you get a new one/break one?

As long as you occasionally sync it with your itunes (which it can do wirelessly now), you'll never lose a book or an app. It's pretty damn good about remembering that sort of stuff.

I really think this is a good idea. Hell one semester of books can cost 2 iPads.

But problematically book publishers that sell e-books (as well as retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble) price e-books at... exactly the same cost as a physcal book. So unless you're pirating... it's iPad + books... meaning nothing but extra cost. Also, I assume you're talking about college, because K-12, students don't buy the textbooks. Also, the reatil cost of K-12 textbooks is significantly lesser than college.

rubi_con_man: I think we should be a little more blatant about things;

Let's take the American education system and re-vamp it. Those children whose parents can feed them on a regular basis and make more than the national median income get to go to regular school. Everyone else gets to go to 'serf school' where they learn to enjoy their station in life, and how to worship the middle and upper classes that are their rightful masters.

We can even shave off the stupid girls from the upper class and add them to the stupid girls from the lower class and put them into a third school, where they can learn to be proper worthless whores who can be raped, beaten and dominated by the boys of our neo-utopian society, so when our leaders feel the need to philander, they can have a ready supply of dumb, pliant, sterilized poon-tang into which they can dump their nasty business. This will have the additional benefit of providing a solution to the abortion problem, since it'll be impossible for these women to conceive, since they'll be sterilized with permo-IUDs at 13 or 14. The more troublesome of these girls can actually experience a painless, cost-free lobotomy so that they can enjoy their life without the worries of emotional pain or shame or any of those nasty feelings that lead such prized pieces of snatch to kill themselves before they turn ugly or turn 30.

How bout that? We can just institutionalize the prejudices of the 1% just like that.

I think institutionalizing this will take the fun out of it.

namatad: pickledick: while I encourage the digitization of textbooks, I hope it will be in a way that won't monopolize on it. It would be great if it was something like those free MIT classes posted online

LOL
good luck with that ...
but yes,
would be awesome if the price of books was cut in half say ....
but my guess is that most of the cost of books is pure profit for the publishers

Not really pure profit. I'm working on helping create an iPad/Android/Kindle app for my company's science books. There is a lot of time and money involved in these apps. It's not just converting the books to PDF and slapping them on a device. Lots of coding involved, and having to get other companies involved in the process. I'm really unsure as to how much profit will actually be made from this move.

E-books in general though are easy to create and super cost effective, as long as there's no interaction involved.

Quantumbunny: But problematically book publishers that sell e-books (as well as retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble) price e-books at... exactly the same cost as a physcal book. So unless you're pirating...

People pay for digital books?

What a waste. A good university library is much, much better than anything you'll find online, anyway. Sure, there would be a problem if everyone in a particular class went after books about Topic X, but that never happens, despite library books being free.

Krissta: namatad: pickledick: while I encourage the digitization of textbooks, I hope it will be in a way that won't monopolize on it. It would be great if it was something like those free MIT classes posted online

LOL
good luck with that ...
but yes,
would be awesome if the price of books was cut in half say ....
but my guess is that most of the cost of books is pure profit for the publishers

Not really pure profit. I'm working on helping create an iPad/Android/Kindle app for my company's science books. There is a lot of time and money involved in these apps. It's not just converting the books to PDF and slapping them on a device. Lots of coding involved, and having to get other companies involved in the process. I'm really unsure as to how much profit will actually be made from this move.

E-books in general though are easy to create and super cost effective, as long as there's no interaction involved.

Why are you writing your own apps for this? With Kindle, Nook, Google Books, iBooks, Aldiko, Kobo, FBReader, Moon+, GoSpoken, and the other 400 reader apps already there... I'm curious why your company would choose it's own app... and I'm guessing that answer is proprietary format and DRM. No?

Quantumbunny: Krissta: namatad: pickledick: while I encourage the digitization of textbooks, I hope it will be in a way that won't monopolize on it. It would be great if it was something like those free MIT classes posted online

LOL
good luck with that ...
but yes,
would be awesome if the price of books was cut in half say ....
but my guess is that most of the cost of books is pure profit for the publishers

Not really pure profit. I'm working on helping create an iPad/Android/Kindle app for my company's science books. There is a lot of time and money involved in these apps. It's not just converting the books to PDF and slapping them on a device. Lots of coding involved, and having to get other companies involved in the process. I'm really unsure as to how much profit will actually be made from this move.

E-books in general though are easy to create and super cost effective, as long as there's no interaction involved.

Why are you writing your own apps for this? With Kindle, Nook, Google Books, iBooks, Aldiko, Kobo, FBReader, Moon+, GoSpoken, and the other 400 reader apps already there... I'm curious why your company would choose it's own app... and I'm guessing that answer is proprietary format and DRM. No?
Why we're doing it this way? Because management thinks it's best. ;)

(To clarify, we're making an app to sell on the Apple app marketplace, and the Android will have to be designed separately.)

It's technically not a "book," it's more like an interactive physics app using our materials. It's to use with our book program, but it could be used by itself. I'm not sure if we'll end up doing full books, but I can't imagine we'd try and go the app route.

The problem is is that every device has it's own formatting. For instance, the Kindle requires us to go from InDesign to HTML. So everything has to be coded, which can be helped by tagging it correctly in InDesign. This includes text, sidebar text, every image has to be linked to the text it is referencing, etc. But that requires some backtracking and such. It's a PITA. :)