A guided tour to the slave trade from Give Me Liberty! An American History by Eric Foner.When it comes to a legacy technology that badly needs to be disrupted, its hard to imagine a better example than the college textbook.Its big, heavy, expensive often over $200, and — as Matt MacInnis, CEO of the disruptive digital textbook company, Inkling, jokes — “Its out of date before it even gets to the printer.”Students have to lug these anachronisms around in backpacks, only to read a chapter here and there as assigned by their professors. New editions appear every two or three years, rendering the older editions essentially worthless.Second-hand bookstores do a thriving business on campuses as students try to stay within their budgets. Book-sharing, renting, and lending as well as illegal copying all occur as well.A professor trying to teach from a core textbook in many subjects often finds it resembles the Winchester Mystery House, with chapters added on willy-nilly to a structure that originated many editions in the past, often decades ago.MacInnis and Inkling seek to change all that, and, in the process, fundamentally transform the way students acquire knowledge. “Our goal is to redefine the way people learn from this kind of content,” he says. “A digital textbook is not a book, it is software. So its no longer about editions that come out every few years, its about versions that you improve quickly whenever they need it.”Its also about the platform. Today, given that Apple controls 97 percent of the tablet market, Inkling versions of textbooks are available on iPads, but, MacInnis says, “in the long-term, as other tablets emerge, we will be platform-agnostic.”Consider the cost savings: Students no longer need to buy textbooks; instead they license software, paying only for those chapters needed at any particular time, at $2.99/chapter. Even if as many as 30 chapters are downloaded from a textbook, the cost would still be less than half the traditional purchase fee of a hardcover edition.
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