Text Books will be more expensive

[Chaos123x]

All this hype about how the iPad will be great for students is bull.

First there is no handwriting tech for taking notes and the other issue is the price of text books.

looking at the prices at other e-books on the ibooks store it seems that they go for about the same price as new physical copy.

Allot of students buy used copies of books for cheap, and the sell them when they no longer need to use them. If you can't buy them for cheaper or sell them off, the ibooks are gonna be way more expensive.

 

[appleguy123]

1. How do you know the cost of the books? Is it just the 14.99$ price Apple mentioned?
2. Never underestimate the power of desperation. If the student have an iPad and can't afford the books, they will pirate them.

 

[JohnnyQuest]

Honestly, used books aren't that cheap either. I'm a student, and the thought of having all my text books in a .5" package is great.

 

[Chaos123x]

1. How do you know the cost of the books? Is it just the 14.99$ price Apple mentioned?
2. Never underestimate the power of desperation. If the student have an iPad and can't afford the books, they will pirate them.

yeah well it needs pirated content, would the iPod ever become so successful without pirate content?


Question can you buy a iPad/kindle with a student loan and claim it as a book expense?

 

[mackmgg]

yeah well it needs pirated content, would the iPod ever become so successful without pirate content?


Question can you buy a iPad/kindle with a student loan and claim it as a book expense?

Well has it been tried yet with an iPad? You might be able to actually. People probably have done that with a kindle before

 

[MTI]

First there is no handwriting tech for taking notes and the other issue is the price of text books.

Frankly do you think handwriting is the best means for taking notes? There are already e-readers that support highlighting; the iPhone OS supports cut & paste; Spotlight search is built in . . .

 

[Chaos123x]

Frankly do you think handwriting is the best means for taking notes? There are already e-readers that support highlighting; the iPhone OS supports cut & paste; Spotlight search is built in . . .

I don't take notes, i'd rather pay attention and listen to the lecture then trying to jot down info that I will never look at and will probably lose.

 

[MTI]

The iPad has a small built in mic . . . perhaps all you'll need is a refined text to speech app.

 

[appleguy123]

The iPad has a small built in mic . . . perhaps all you'll need is a refined text to speech app.

If this happens to will be pretty cool, but it would probably take a lot of processing to accommodate the variations in ones voice while giving a lecture and the traditional background noises in school settings.

 

[gusto5]

Frankly do you think handwriting is the best means for taking notes? There are already e-readers that support highlighting; the iPhone OS supports cut & paste; Spotlight search is built in . . .

To give an example, it is very, very difficult to study organic chemistry of any sort (intro, synthesis, mechanisms, etc.) if we can't draw detailed structures. You can also imagine other fields of study that may need visual diagrams drawn on the fly (Physics, Engineering, Math to some extent).

 

[pgseye]

A question here:

I've got a bunch of textbooks in pdf format. Is it likely that I'll be able to put them on and view them on the ipad without any problem, or only content synced through ibooks for example?

Thanks

 

[appleguy123]

A question here:

I've got a bunch of textbooks in pdf format. Is it likely that I'll be able to put them on and view them on the ipad without any problem, or only content synced through ibooks for example?

Thanks

No one knows but uploading them to the web or emailing them to yourself seems to be a pretty safe bet.

 

[bigwayne3000]

the argument that somehow textbooks would be more expensive is a bit absurd. for one, your argument about students buying books and returning them isnt that great because most school dont even give you 1/4 of what you paid for the book so in some case its not even worth it to return. i bought an $80 book last semester and went to return it and they wanted to give me $5 dollars for it. if textbooks came out on this thing or kindle publishers could save a lot of money on printing fees etc. even if they charged $20-30 for a book d/l itll be worth it to me. i rent my books from chegg now instead of buying. i loose out on the return money but its fine because i get books cheap and the money i would get back is so minimal it doesnt even matter. the only reason i might not use textbooks on the iPad is due to no multitasking. if there was a way to have the textbook on half the screen with pages on the other half for notes etc than itd be worth it. itll be a pain in the butt clicking back and forth every 2 seconds between the text and pages or the web. hopefully they come up with a way to multi task at least 2 programs w/ OS 4.0

 

[calderone]

Nevermind.

 

[Chaos123x]

if textbooks came out on this thing or kindle publishers could save a lot of money on printing fees etc. even if they charged $20-30 for a book d/l itll be worth it to me. 0

What makes you think they are going to pass the savings onto the customer?

I bet they will charge the full price for the text book $80-$100.

 

[NT1440]

Honestly, used books aren't that cheap either. I'm a student, and the thought of having all my text books in a .5" package is great.

This. Having just one device i can take out and have my entire book library, along with everything else, would just be a dream.

 

[Steven.nevets]

this term I actually bought a textbook from the kindle store, and saved about $50 on it compared to my school's bookstore. it was significant enough that I decided it was worth it. I can easily see saving about 25% from the iBookstore, and adding the convenience of only having this device instead of massive hardcover books is all I need to convince me to buy all my books on the iPad.

ps the book was "Introduction to Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics" by Keith Stowe, if anyone is curious, or wants to fact-check me

 

[Rodimus Prime]

the argument that somehow textbooks would be more expensive is a bit absurd. for one, your argument about students buying books and returning them isnt that great because most school dont even give you 1/4 of what you paid for the book so in some case its not even worth it to return. i bought an $80 book last semester and went to return it and they wanted to give me $5 dollars for it. if textbooks came out on this thing or kindle publishers could save a lot of money on printing fees etc. even if they charged $20-30 for a book d/l itll be worth it to me. i rent my books from chegg now instead of buying. i loose out on the return money but its fine because i get books cheap and the money i would get back is so minimal it doesnt even matter. the only reason i might not use textbooks on the iPad is due to no multitasking. if there was a way to have the textbook on half the screen with pages on the other half for notes etc than itd be worth it. itll be a pain in the butt clicking back and forth every 2 seconds between the text and pages or the web. hopefully they come up with a way to multi task at least 2 programs w/ OS 4.0

Something you need to remember the printing cost of the text book is self is pretty damn small. Most of the money goes to license fees and to line the publishers pocket. Most of it goes to line the publishers pocket. Case and point is a new edition being shoved out every 12-18 months and the changes are only to the HW questions. The worse one I saw was this book that went from the 5-6th edition. The changes was the order of the HW/review question in the back of each chapter. They did not even take the time to put in new numbers or words. Hell that publisher was known for that. I think we were using the solution manual from the 2nd edition for our 6th edition book for answers. Just had to find the question that was moved.

Really start looking at the changes from 4th to 6th or 7th edition and you will see the changes are almost always only to homework and if you are lucky the pictures goes from BW to color.

E-Books will not change that. They will still rip you off and if you can sell the book back the losses will work out to be that the E-book cost more.

My college had a policy that if the book was being used the next semester they would buy it back at 50% what we pad for it. It was great for math books which tended to for a few years but bad for other books.

Long story short E-Books will not bring down the cost of text books. If anything it will cause the prices to go up. E-book cost todays prices and the physical book cost will go up and that to just justify the fact E-Books are "cheaper"

 

[Steven.nevets]

it really sounds like you haven't looked at the MANY textbooks already offered in the kindle store, for way cheaper than the hardcover version. you wont get an ebook textbook for $20, but you will save at least that compared to the hardcover.

 

[fox10078]

theres no reason to think with the big screen there won't be a handwriting app.

 

[NT1440]

theres no reason to think with the big screen there won't be a handwriting app.

What good is that?

For handwriting recognition to be any use, it has to be system wide.

 

[fox10078]

What good is that?

For handwriting recognition to be any use, it has to be system wide.

Indeed, Does the system have to have it, or could the App developer write his app to do it? You can use it If you really need to take notes with a stylus. The system doesn't have it, so I'm just trying to think of possible solutions. If the app saves your notes why does it need to be system wide then?

 

[NT1440]

Indeed, Does the system have to have it, or could the App developer write his app to do it? You can use it If you really need to take notes with a stylus. The system doesn't have it, so I'm just trying to think of possible solutions.

If pulled off well, it could be a good note taking app.

 

[Hammie]

I'm not a student, I use a lot of Cisco Press (CP) books for my job. I've seen that they are about half the cost of the hardcover books on the Kindle site (my wife has a Kindle so I've browsed the store).

I currently have about 20 CP books. Out of those, 3-5 I look at fairly frequently. If I had access to these while I am out of the office, it would be great.

I also have about 2-3GB of PDF's from various vendors such as Adtran, Juniper, Nortel, and Cisco that I have gathered over the years. Some are outdated but others really don't change much. It would be nice if I could throw these on an SD card and use the Camera attachment to "upload" them to the device.

 

[tollickd]

If it lets to use pdf files I will get one as soon as they come out!