This Wednesday, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski
announced an initiative to encourage schools and companies to adopt and transition to digital textbooks in schools over the next five years.
The government push towards digital textbooks stands to benefit Apple immensely. The Cupertino-based company launched its iBooks Textbooks just two weeks ago, and since its tablet is so far ahead of the competition, the iPad could very well become the go-to tool in the switch from paper to digital textbooks.
While digital learning has been embraced in states like Florida, Idaho, Utah, and California, most schools lack both the technology and the funds to set up a digital textbook system. Additionally, the iPad is cost-prohibitive for students, which remains a major roadblock towards the widespread adoption of the tablet for education purposes.
All the same, digital textbooks are the future. “When a student reads a textbook and gets to something they don’t know, they are stuck,” said Genachowski. “Working with the same material on a digital textbook, when they get to something they don’t know, the device can let them explore: It can show them what a word means, how to solve a math problem that they couldn’t figure out how to solve.”
Genachowski is also confident that the price of tablets will become more affordable, and since textbooks are an $8 billion dollar a year industry, Apple may be motivated to lower the price on its tablets. It’s widely thought that the iPad 3’s release will mark a price drop on the iPad 2, and I could even see a situation where Apple develops a stripped-down version of its tablet to sell to schools.
With a low cost iPad option and government subsidies for the purchase of the technology, the transition may be easier than we think. In just five years, those heavy, clunky paper textbooks that we carried around as kids might be a thing of the past.
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