The news last week that Apple was setting its sights on the $8-billion-a-year (in the U.S.) textbook industry is interesting on a few levels.

Apple's idea is that textbook publishers will adapt their titles for the iPad, and school and college students will carry tablets loaded with e-texts, instead of piles of hardcopy books.

If nothing else, our children will be spared spinal deformation.

Apple announced a few sample titles from major textbook publishing partners last week, including standard U.S. high school texts. A new version of its iPad iBook app also appeared that accommodates interactive elements in the new-style texts. And a new developer application makes it easier to adapt existing titles to the new format.

If nothing else, the company's push into the textbook market shows that marketing audacity and boldness at Apple did not die with Steve Jobs. But audacity and boldness may not be enough in this case.

The Apple plan is fraught with difficulty, at least in public K-12 education, where the focus appears to be.

Do students supply their own iPads? If yes, the digital divide becomes a chasm.

Students from affluent families will enjoy the benefits of multimedia-enhanced interactive texts, and lighter backpacks, while students from poorer families suffer along with boring, heavy old hardcopy texts.

And it may not just be differences in the learning experience. Some research has suggested that students using iPad texts score better on standardized tests.

Occupy Cupertino!

The alternative would be school districts equipping every child with a $600 iPad. Perhaps governments will impose iPad taxes. (Imagine the outcry from Android tablet manufacturers.)

Even if governments somehow found the political will and money to fund such an initiative, the security and support headaches involved in distributing thousands of iPads boggles the imagination.

Why would schoolyard bullies, for example, bother extorting lunch money when they could have your kid's iPad?

And ask yourself how many school-supplied texts each year are dropped in puddles, lost, eaten by dogs and run over by buses?

And yet, nobody could deny the potential benefits.

In fact, the other interesting thing about the Apple initiative is that the company is really only co-opting what others were already doing, as it often does.

Textbook publishers were pursuing iPad-related initiatives on their own and with other partners. Entrepreneurial start-ups such as Inkling were adapting and adding multimedia and interactive elements to existing texts.

Kno a reseller of PDF-based electronic textbooks with an iPad reader app has an online store selling 150,000 e-textbook titles.

And we reported here last year that CDI, a private post-secondary vocational college with 40 locations across Canada, was switching from issuing hardcopy textbooks to iPads loaded with e-texts. "It's a strategic initiative on two levels - administrative and educational," explained Bohdan Bilan, CDI's Vice President of Academics & Regulatory Affairs.

The school would save on not having to pay for shipping and inventory of hardcopy texts and managing their distribution and retrieval. It also believed giving students easier access to multimedia online resources would enhance the educational experience.

Hmm. Could those administrative savings be enough to fund an iPad program in public schools?

Article Tags:  Apple, education, school, textbook, backpack, Bilan, CDI, Kno, Inkling, iPad, Blackwell