I sat down with my iPad to read “The Yellow Submarine” with a friend’s 7-year-old twins, and within 10 minutes, we were embroiled in a conflict that captured the central, nagging problem with the enhanced e-book concept. Desmond liked playing with the interactive features — the digital equivalent of the tabs and flaps in a paper pop-up book — although few of these could steal his ongoing fascination away from the iPad’s system-wide “pinch to expand” feature. Nini was aggravated by her brother’s pinching, tapping and swiping, and shouted, “I’m trying to read the story!” (Neither one cared much about either the music or the videos, incidentally.) Instead of a cozy interlude of reading, we had a fight.

For some of the books she discusses, children’s books (because those are the ones that tend to get the most bells and whistles added), the apps come off as more like movies or games than books.

She also looks at three enhanced versions of an adult story, the Sherlock Holmes tale “The Speckled Band”. She thought Vook’s, equipped with video mini-documentaries, was interesting but she found no compelling reason the films should be interspersed with the story rather than available separately. The BookTrack version’s background audio track was either distracting or ignorable. Byook’s was the most enjoyable to her, as it included some illustrations, maps, and diagrams that she found actually did enhance the reading experience.

Miller does note that interactivity offers much more promise for non-fiction books, and will discuss them in a further article.

“The Cinderella story isn’t new, but Nosy Crow’s developers use the app platform in new ways to make this an entertaining experience with extremely high play value and a long engagement time,” said the Publishing Innovation Awards judges of the Juvenile App category. “Clever design decisions, excellent navigation, and enhanced content allow young readers to play in a very natural way with the story. Readers can stay on a page as long as they like and will be rewarded for every tap, tip, or swipe.

While I doubt appbooks will replace regular books or even regular e-books, there is certainly room for well-created apps that can help the learning process. This $7.99 app (with a free lite version) looks like a good example—as well as a great example of how stories in the public domain can be put to commercial use.

Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical support.

Students do like tablets such as the iPad, but they seem to be taking to Chromebooks just as well.

"Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you," said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She added, though, that Chromebooks have a place: "They will bow down and kiss your feet for a tablet or for a [Chromebook]. But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish."

Which type of device is better for education? The iPad will allow for interactive textbooks, but there’s no reason that such textbooks couldn’t be used on the Chromebook as well—indeed, Kno’s textbooks can be accessed from any web browser. And the Chromebook’s keyboard and Google Docs word processor means that students can write papers and other creative works on it much more easily than they could on the keyboardless iPad. At a suggested retail price of $349.99, the Chromebook is $150 cheaper than the basic iPad, too—a big savings when it comes to schools buying tens of thousands of them.

One of the things that digital content makes obvious is that the current physical manifestation of a print-bound textbook is a strangely awful construct — one designed to remove students one step (at least one step) from the primary sources that inform the field they’re studying. You don’t read Darwin; you read "Introduction to Biology." You don’t read de Tocqueville; you read "American History I." Sure, textbooks offer easier-to-digest summaries of the content, geared to the particular grade level of the student. They offer diagrams and illustrations and review questions and a glossary. But textbooks are always an assembly from a variety of sources, geared towards a classroom setting where the teacher leads students through the chapters and the exercises and the examinations. Neither the teacher nor the student is expected to be an expert. You just need to know enough to pass the test.

Digitizing that model of instruction changes nothing. Adding video changes nothing. Pinch and zoom and flashcards change nothing.

As for Apple’s $14.99 per student per year model for high school textbooks, Watters points out that a lot of high schools don’t buy new textbooks every year anyway, and if you look at that $14.99 per year as replacing an only slightly more expensive book that lasted several years, it may not be such a good deal after all.

And as for giving students their own permanent e-copy of the material, what student really ever wanted to keep a copy of his high school textbooks, anyway? And even if they had, taking advantage of it is still going to require getting those students their own iPads, an expensive (and currently far from universally-achieved) proposition.

She also has a few words for the iBooks Author e-book-making app, and its much-maligned license that restricts authors from selling their books through any other outlet than Apple. Apart from being restrictive, and providing no way to mark books that she wants to give away for free with a Creative Commons license, she notes that it is ultimately unnecessary—educators are already able to build their own digital textbooks, albeit without as “slick” tools as iBooks Author.

In the end, Watters writes, Apple’s digital textbook announcement is not the kind of revolution previously expected of Apple—it’s more of the same old same old, and “a slap in the face to educators and students.”

It really sounds like Apple set out to solve the wrong problem with this announcement, focusing on high schools when the real problem, and the much faster move toward e (since college students are more able to afford tablets), is college textbooks. It will be interesting to see what kind of deal Apple can offer them. But I can certainly see Watters’s point of view here—for high schools, this is not the sort of world-changer Apple has been known for in the past.

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens as screen display technology gets better and lets tablets steal some of the screen-readability and battery life benefits of e-readers. Will dedicated e-readers stay around? Will they get so cheap that people treat them as disposable? Will tablets get that cheap?

It’s amazing how much the prices on big-screen high-definition TVs have come down over just the last few years. I regularly talk to people in my “day job” who paid a thousand bucks for a TV that has an equivalent costing less than half that today. Electronics prices can drop fast if enough economy of scale is applied.

So far, we haven’t really gotten to that point with tablets yet (perhaps, aside from the display issue, because only two tablets have ever really taken off marketwise). But sooner or later, we will. If nothing else, Amazon has a pretty big incentive to make both e-ink and tablet devices as cheap as possible so it can sell more e-books and movie streaming.

The program will be great for college students, Siegler points out. The idea of textbook prices capped at $15 makes the sting of not being able to “sell them back” a lot less painful. (Assuming that $15 applies to college as well as high school texts, of course.) But iPads are awfully expensive for high schoolers or their parents to be able to afford, especially in places like the inner cities where such a device might not necessarily remain too long in its owner’s possession if it’s seen in the wrong place.

Even if when the next iPad is announced, the current model drops in price to something like $400 — or even $300 — that’s still an expensive sell to high school students and/or their parents and/or their schools. If every kid in the world already had an iPad, this would be the most brilliant program ever. Unfortunately, Apple needs to sell at least a few billion more iPads to get to that point.

Siegler suggests that, to get to the bright future where students are able to keep their books on their tablets, we need to see about getting tablets in those students’ hands first.

Who knows? Perhaps in a few years we’ll have found a cheap enough display technology to make that happen.

Galant reports that his own experience resubscribing to a magazine involved being billed on an actual physical invoice that came in the mail. “In Japan you can buy a coke from a vending machine with your phone,” Galant points out. “The magazine industry’s still mailing invoices?”

While other digital services provide near-immediate gratification, Galant says, the magazine industry still seems to be stuck in an age where it can take up to five weeks to start filling a new subscription.

It’s time for the magazine industry to take a page from companies like Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) and Spotify: charge by the month, require a credit card, auto-renew payments and let people cancel anytime.

Subscriptions in this modern style are fueling impressive revenue growth of companies serving a wide variety of consumers and corporate clients, including Dropbox, GigaOM, Birchbox, 37signals, JibJab and MailChimp. (My company recently adopted this model by introducing a professional version of Muck Rack.)

He then provides a number of reasons why magazines should do it, too, including the psychological advantage of monthly fees and being able to cancel at any time, no need for yearly renewals, and being able to devote the attention that did go to maintaining yearly subscriptions to finding other ways to improve the experience.

I think Galant’s advice makes a great deal of sense. There are a lot of companies that have been charging by the month in this way—not just Netflix, but your local cable company, utility company, phone company. Companies that provide services. Magazines have tended to be considered more of a good, and undoubtedly the companies didn’t want the extra costs that monthly billing would have entailed.

But with the rise of information technology, magazines (and for that matter newspapers) are coming to seem more like an information service that gets you the information either in bits or on paper, and perhaps they should start charging that way.

This represents a bit of a double-whammy for ad-funded media like newspapers and magazines—not only are they getting fewer sales, but they’re also losing the print ad views of the demographic of people affluent enough to afford an iPad. That may not bode well for their long-term future.

Matt Burns argues that tablets should mostly be kept out of the classroom, fearing that they could turn into yet another crutch for our youth, just as pocket calculators mean kids no longer need to know how to actually do math.

Kids are now taught to pass tests. Knowledge is externalized, stored on some Wikipedia server or graphing calculator until needed. Learning is still prevalent in schools, but the storage of facts and thoughts is not. Digital textbooks will only further this problem. Just click on a word to get its definition, says Apple.

He also points out the potential for distraction, that kids could use the devices to look at things that interest them rather than what they’re supposed to be studying.

Burns isn’t entirely opposed to iPads in schools, as he recognizes they do have the potential to be a powerful tool. However, he is concerned that the disadvantages may outweigh the benefits.

On the other hand, Greg Kumparak thinks that iPads definitely have a place in the classroom, as part of a more balanced approach to education, with kids learning how to solve problems both with and without the aid of technology.

I honestly believe it’s entirely possible — nay, crucial — to teach a kid to live both with and without technology. Teach and test them on how to do it the hard way (and more importantly, to understand the underlying concepts)… then drive it in with technology. If you instill a sense of pride in doing things with your very own brain, perhaps all that junk won’t fly out the window as soon as the diploma is signed. It’s all about balance.

He also points out that kids are going to find ways to distract themselves no matter what educational materials they are given, and that teachers should already be watching out for that sort of thing even with printed books.

Both of these articles raise important points, and it’s clear that adding technology to a curriculum is more than just a matter of plopping iPads into classrooms without supervision or adjustment. And it seems likely that any advance in technology will generate the same sort of discussion when it comes time to consider its use in education.  In the end, only time will tell how well adding this particular sort of technology to the classroom will work out.

But Apple may have more up its sleeve than just an e-book creation application. It may be planning announcements having to do with digital textbooks, especially considering that the iPad has a great big screen and multimedia capabilities that the company hasn’t really tapped yet for textbook applications.

[Inkling CEO Matt] MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices. Apple can "kick up dust with the education market," which could then create visibility for platforms like Inkling. This could then serve as a sort of professional Logic-type tool for interactive textbook creation complement to Apple’s "GarageBand for e-books."

The Ars piece also notes that digital textbooks were one of Steve Jobs’s final projects, and might have originally been intended to announce back when the iPhone 4S came out in October. Jobs reportedly saw textbook publishing as an “$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction.”

It should be interesting to see what Apple has in store for us tomorrow. The idea of “destroying” the textbook industry sounds a little ambitious, but given what Apple’s accomplished over the last ten years it might just be entitled.

It has been a couple of weeks since I received my TruConnect MiFi for Christmas, and I’ve used it enough to get a decent idea of how well it works. I use the MiFi mostly with my iPod Touch and iPad, though I have had the chance to try it with my laptop as well.

Fundamentally, the device works at a speed of 320 kilobits down, 100 kilobits up. Even if it weren’t for the per-megabyte bandwidth charges, this is not something you would want to use to watch YouTube movies, and streaming Netflix is right out of the question. (I tried streaming Pandora as an experiment, and it played half a song and then started having to buffer every few seconds.)

Indeed, anything more than simple web browsing and text chat seems remarkably slow. If you get one of these and use it for web browsing, you will probably want to use a browser such as Opera that supports a low-bandwidth “turbo” mode. (Of course, it’s all relative. Back in the ‘90s, to anyone stuck with a dial-up modem, 320/100 kilobits would have been heavenly speed.)

Signing up with the TruConnect service was relatively simple—or it should have been, save that there was some sort of problem creating my account the first time, and I had to send in a ticket and wait a couple of days for them to reset the account so I could use it.

The service uses Sprint’s 3G mobile network, and charges $4.99 per month of use, plus 3.9 cents per megabyte of usage. The monthly charge only applies for months in which the device is used—though since I’m going to be using it pretty much every day, I can’t imagine I’ll ever go a month without being charged. It is a pre-paid service: they charge you $10 at a time to fill your account, then you use from that balance and they top up your account whenever your balance dwindles to $5. (They did accidentally charge me twice for my first top-up, but they noticed and corrected the issue themselves.)

My main use of the MiFi thus far has been for checking e-mail, loading RSS feeds into Reeder, and checking or updating Facebook and Twitter. It tends to take a while to get any results—I have to give it a minute or so for Facebook or Reeder to start to update. But as slow as it runs, I expect that’s fairly normal. The MiFi also lets me check in on Yelp, Facebook, or Foursquare, even from places that don’t have wifi of their own. I just need to be able to detect some other wireless network, and the iPod Touch or iPad’s geolocation service looks up its SSID to find out where I am.

When using it with my laptop, I can plug in the included USB cable to the device and use it as a USB 3G modem. This also lets it charge the battery, but turns wifi off so I can’t use it with my other gadgets. (I gather there may be a way to patch it so I can still use it with wifi at the same time, but I haven’t looked into that yet.) The first time it is connected to a computer, it will install a NovaTel USB connection utility off of internal storage, which allows the laptop to connect and monitors bandwidth usage.

While I have not actually used the device to download an e-book yet, I have little doubt I could do so easily with IOS 5’s integration of Safari with other apps for download purposes. Most e-books are small enough that they ought to download right away.

As far as battery life goes, it promises 4 hours of use or 40 of standby. I think that might be a little optimistic, but most of the time I’m able to get at least a couple of hours of continuous use out of it before it starts warning me of low battery power. For just checking on my breaks at work, or occasionally while I’m out and about, I can use it all day without problems. I do charge it overnight, every night.

There are a few things about the MiFi that I don’t like quite as much, however. For example, I’m not entirely sure why, but frequently when I’m using it with my iPod Touch or iPad I have to turn it off twice, because a second after the first time I turn it off, it comes right back on again. (I’m guessing this has something to do with the way the iOS devices maintain a wifi connection for a while even after I put them to sleep—perhaps the MiFi senses they’re trying to send something, and comes right back on again.) Sometimes it won’t turn off the second time, and I actually have to pop the battery out to get it to shut down. It also gets a little warm during use—not hot enough to burn, but certainly hot enough I can feel it in my pocket.

One other thing that’s slightly annoying is that the device came with a label on the bottom listing the default SSID and password (both of which I’ve since changed), just in case you have to reset the device to factory settings. However, within just a couple of days of carrying it in my pocket, that information had rubbed entirely off! Fortunately the device came with that information copied down on an insert card as well, and I copied it into my Evernote so I won’t lose it,

At any rate, I’m pretty happy with the device so far. The service can seem frustratingly slow at times, but then so can any 3G service. And when I consider that this lets me have iPhone-like mobile web access from my iPod Touch without having to pay an iPhone monthly contract fee, it’s worth every penny.

This is, of course, Amazon’s end run around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchases—a way to provide an iPad-based Kindle store without having to give Apple 30% of its revenue. (An iPhone version will reportedly be out soon.) It looks just like any other application on the iPad, but as a web app it is not subject to Apple’s requirements. It looks very well-polished, and will undoubtedly help drive more revenue to Amazon.

What about if programmers made e-books?

The Toronto Review of Books has an interview with Chris Stevens, the co-creator of the Alice in Wonderland iPad app that has gotten a lot of positive attention. The discussion of the development of the app out of a public domain title is interesting in its own right, but in part of this interview, Stevens speaks out about what he sees as a succession of “lacklustre iPad titles” coming from apathetic publishers.

What’s happening at the moment is that most publishers are handing their major titles over to app developers who are ruining these titles with rushed, unprofessional layout and design. There is this weird situation where programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books. We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers who—despite their excellence at programming—are not designers. The complete lack of care and attention paid to the production of digital books is genuinely mystifying.

Of course, he’s by and large talking about e-book apps, rather than the standard words-on-screen e-reader formats that people consume on their Kindles or Nooks (or Kindle or Nook iPad apps), but there have also been people who complain that slavish attempts to reproduce a print book on a screen rather than adapting it to make use of all the potential of the new medium are themselves a disservice to the material.

Still, words-on-screen e-books will probably be with us for a good long time, and it’s hard to see what a programmer could do to mess those up.

(Found via Slashdot.)

She notes that it’s currently possible for independent authors to get on the iBookstore through Smashwords, but the Apple program will be designed to give authors incentives to publish exclusively with Apple.

However, Smashwords’s Mark Coker is highly dubious about this rumor. He told eBookNewser that Apple already has a self-publishing program, and a system of carefully-vetted aggregators such as Smashwords who serve it.

According to Coker, there isn’t another retailer with such a rigorous qualification process for authorized aggregators. He said, “Unlike others, Apple actively encourages authors and publishers to deliver books through their aggregators. Apple realizes that they’re going to earn a 30% commission whether they source the book from an aggregator or from their own platform, and books sourced from aggregators are more profitable for Apple because they can be sourced at lower cost (no need to invest millions of long term dollars to maintain and staff their own platform) and greater scalability than from one’s own platform.”

What Coker says makes a lot of sense. Apple is the company that invented the 30% agency pricing cut, after all, and why would they want to spend big on setting up an infrastructure under which they’d earn exactly the same 30% they would if they let someone else do all the work?

Also, it seems unlikely that any right-thinking authors would want to publish exclusively with Apple, when they could publish with Amazon and Barnes & Noble who between them make up something like 90% of the e-book market. Why would anyone limit himself to Apple, by comparison a totally third-rate player in the field?

Whatever happens, I’m sure Apple will have a lot of surprises to unveil at the January event, its first post-Jobs show. The company always does. And perhaps some of them will have to do with e-publishing. We’ll just have to wait and see what they actually are.

The article discusses what this means in terms of the one million unskilled laborers FoxConn currently employs, and unskilled labor versus automation. A survey this year found that “53% of US manufacturing firms believe that less than 50% of their human workers have the skills and work ethic required to do high performance work.” In order to “move up the value chain,” unskilled workers will need to be retrained in those skills. Kirkpatrick writes:

It may soon come to the point, if it hasn’t already, where the supply of and demand for skilled labor become imbalanced enough that the market value of skill building shoots through the roof.

He discusses a few on-line learning startups such as Rypple and WorkDay that might offer promise in this area.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just too foggy to understand the premise he’s expressing here, but it seems to me that the question of what to do with unskilled laborers when their jobs are taken by machines has been asked again and again ever since the invention of the cotton gin. I remember reading a satirical mid-20th-century science fiction story (I wish I could remember the title and author) in which the rise of robotic manufacturing had led to such a surplus in consumer goods that "poor" people were forced to live in huge mansions while "rich" people were able to simplify down to one- or two-room houses. What’s changed?

Certainly there are a lot of tools now to help educate people—not just those startups, but also free general-purpose tools like Khan Academy. Will unskilled laborers be able to use those kinds of tools to become skilled enough to “move up the value chain”? Will employers really be interested in helping them do that rather than just looking for new workers who already have those skills? It should be interesting to find out.