Are iBooks the Answer, or the iPad’s Foot in the Door?

I first glimpsed the future of the book, and more broadly the textbook, when I bought my first-but-discontinued (that is, old) Newton MessagePad 2100 in the summer of 2002. It was just before I was to start work as a school psychologist; I’d managed to get through 2+ years of graduate school without keeping any real semblance of a calendar or task list, just notebooks and my computers, on which I’d written all of my papers and assignments, and prepared presentations. I have always regretted not buying it before I started school, because I think I would have used the hell out of it.

The Newton was old by technology lifespans, but it was, in my opinion, a far more capable and intriguing device than the Handspring Visor I’d bought on a whim one evening in school. The Visor was new but not especially capable, especially considering the handwriting recognition, or “Graffiti,” which required me to memorize a novel alphabet that harkened the characters the represented, but were far from actually looking like a letter. Even adding a space between words required the gesture-equivalent of a tap on the spacebar.

So used to this manner of “writing” was I that when I opened up the box containing my Newton, I began to write on the screen using Grafitti. Obviously, this didn’t work; I saw odd characters on the screen that didn’t match the letters I was trying to write. I assumed the thing was broken.

After following a few tutorials on how to use the Newton, however, I realized that the Newton handwriting recognition engine, or “Rosetta,” recognized my natural print. I could train it to recognize characters it didn’t understand at first. The OS’s “intelligence” was fascinating inasmuch as it supported natural language to create calendar events from within the Notes application. It really was ahead of its time.

It wasn’t long before I put a few ebooks onto the Newton, and while it was not a great reading device, a number of features that would eventually become part of the notional “modern” textbook (or textbook of the future) became evident:

• a portable library of a lot of books and reference materials;
• a library you could back up and always re-install or download to your device, if something broke or got lost;
• an interactive experience, where the reader could highlight, make notes, and otherwise manipulate, without actually inking up an expensive textbook;
• imbedded multimedia to enhance what had previously been limited to illustrations;
• the ability to search;
• my own little fantasy feature: you could share your “handwritten” notes right out of the book with others.

As a fan of books (if not necessarily textbooks), it was not the experience of reading dead tree books that made me yearn for my imagined e-text device, but rather the advantages of a highly portable library that allowed the reader to use something as delightful, to me, as the Newton OS. It was the OS itself that I liked, the tactile and visual experience of using the device, and the potential of the thing to be something even greater than a date book or to-do list that I loved.

Fast-forward some eight years, and the iPad is here. The iPad is cheaper, faster, more capable than the Newton ever was, and with Apple’s revelation on Thursday, January 9th, 2012, the textbook of the future is here. Or so says Apple, perhaps hyperbolically.

It seems evident that iBooks textbooks represent an incremental improvement on the dead tree version, which of course do bear criticism: books are heavy, easy to tear, and not especially interactive. Sure, I can think of plenty of kids who can’t seem to make it to their locker often enough. The iPad would solve that problem.

What about lost books? Surely the iPad would fix that problem: just re-download the book. But I can think of kids who have lost technology (for example, the AlphaSmart). You can lose an iPad. You can break one, too. In fact, you can break an iPad far more easily than you can break a book.

Niggles aside, does reading on the iPad represent a wholly more enjoyable activity than reading from a textbook? And if so, is it a panacea to the supposed woes of the American education experience? Critics of American education don’t see textbooks per se as the problem (although the selection and certification process seems to be a favorite demon of the technology press covering this story), but rather that we have an outmoded means of delivering curricula, which itself doesn’t provide modern-day skills.

Notable technology writers are weighing in, and the most interesting perspectives are from Mac-centric writers and teachers. Steve McCabe, writing for TidBits, doesn’t think the Franken-ePub¹ represents any great leap forward:

This was intended to be, clearly, a spectacular advance, a leap forward in educational technology that would disrupt, innovate, surprise, delight; certainly, for me, a technology commentator, and a teacher since 1991, this should have been a revolutionary innovation. But it didn’t, and it wasn’t.

It is true that iBooks textbooks offer a level of engagement that paper books are unable to match, and there is definitely evidence to suggest that novelty in presentation, especially when that novelty involves computers, will, at least temporarily, reduce affective barriers to learning. I know — I did some of the research as a graduate student, again back in the mid-1990s. But those years also saw an incipient movement to take the possibilities offered by computers to personalise and individualise the learning experience offered by technology and exploit the platforms available even fifteen years ago.

I’d like to emphasize McCabe’s point that using a texbook on an iPad would temporarily represent a novel learning environment. That’s a point worth noting, because, like email, such technology will eventually be normal. Common, even. Consider the modern office, including your local educational agency: email is a stable, persistent means of communication. It’s not novel anymore…but I can remember when it was. We’re not going back. What are its contributions? It has increased our speed of communication and offers the ability to time-shift conversations. Email allows me to avoid the fax machine about half of the time I used to.

I don’t want to work without email, but it hasn’t transformed education. And neither will iBooks.

Ryan Fass, writing for ComputerWorld, disagrees:

Apple’s new education tools are revolutionary, both in concept and in execution. The question, however, is whether Apple can reinvent how we learn (and teach) just as it changed the music and home entertainment industries or how we think about and use smartphones and other mobile devices.

For Fass, it comes down to money (affording iPads), the always bashable teachers’ unions, IT implementation, and textbook selection regulations. But his treatment of how or why iBooks are so revolutionary is never fleshed out; in fact, he makes the grand assumption that somehow iBooks “not only consolidates features but pares them back to focus on the actual task at hand: learning.”

I love reading on the iPad, but there are distractions in the device that you just can’t find in your average textbook. It just begs to be fiddled with. And I’d argue the same for computers.

Fraser Spiers points out that Apple’s “reinvention” doesn’t go far enough:

The ownership model for ebooks is out of step with the way schools buy and use most books. Unfortunately, Apple’s announcement didn’t change that much. I had hoped that on Thursday we would see a mechanism for checking books out and back into some kind of “school library” through iBooks. Instead we got a modest price cut on textbooks alone.

But he sees it as part of a longer game, part of which is the new “flatness” (dare I say disintermediation) in publishing, which iBooks Author makes possible: schools can publish their own textbooks and iTunes U lessons. So, for Spiers, the iBooks textbook is a bridge, and a bit of a McGuffin, perhaps:

I understand why Apple is pushing on this: the textbook is culturally and politically embedded in the American education system. It’s also an obvious and easily understood way to sell the benefits of the iPad to the people who control educational spending. Such people are often not ready to hear a pitch about teachers and pupils creating their own materials, using the Internet for learning, and communicating with peers and experts around the world.

So schools get the iPad, spend some money on iBooks, and then, a few years down the road, find out that the textbook landscape has changed considerably from what it was. You find out that your math department has created a “textbook” of its own. And you don’t need to buy as many expensive textbooks. Maybe that’s how it will play out.

And I hope so, because I think that, like my old, retired, beloved Newton, I see the advantages of a highly portable library that allows the reader to use something as delightful, to me, as iOS on the iPad.

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¹ “While the format largely relies on the ePub 2 standard for text and images, the interactivity and advanced layout capabilities are added via proprietary extensions that only iBooks can interpret.”