So my wife got an ipad as a gift and, like my Nook, I immediately checked out its viability as a textbook reader. I found that the ibooks app included on the ipad is exactly the same as the one I have on my iphone but never use because of the small size of the screen. It has the same text highlighting and note-taking abilities as the Nook as well as the same dictionary and Google/Wikipedia search functions. However, its functionality is hamstrung by the same DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. You can highlight all the text you want but you can’t collect and print it if you want to make a study guide. Unlike the Nook, you can email your notes to yourself but these seem of little value if they are not accompanied by the passages that motivated them. Do a little search and you’ll find lots of complaining from users on this subject but I doubt it will do any good. I’m sure the fear is that the entire book will be highlighted and then exported along with any potential profits.
Of course, I am familiar with the world of academic, not commercial publishing where profits are hardly a big concern. I co-edited a book that went through two printings and routinely appeared on the shelves in Barnes and Nobles for over a year. I saw very little money from it nor did I expect any. I am, after all, in the process of putting together a free textbook which, if widely adopted, could dig into the margins of educational publishers. So who am I to weigh in on this subject? But isn’t there a way to satisfy both worlds? I don’t want to begrudge writers their livelihood but perhaps restricting the amount of text you can highlight at any one time would solve the problem. That would mean you would have to cut and paste one page at a time until you had an entire book. Tedium is the enemy of piracy.
I wonder if book publishing is following a similar path as the music industry. When compact discs came out and were priced much higher than vinyl, music publishers insisted that the costs would come down once everyone had a cd player. They never did. Buyers were used to paying less for older music. Suddenly, every cd cost $20 regardless of the music’s age or popularity. Napster was as much a reaction to overpricing as it was to everyone’s desire for free music. Music was becoming out of reach for a lot of people. DRM was the reaction to the mp3 revolution but now even Apple is giving an unrestricted mp3 option for downloads. Today, epub books are not considerably less expensive than physical books. Obviously the savings gained from not printing, binding, and selling from a brick and mortar store is not being passed on to the customer in any meaningful way. Seems like a similar road…
