As a college student, I'd be much happier to drop the money on an iPad than buying outrageously priced books every semester, and only getting back half of what I paid. I've lost hundreds on textbooks in the past 2 years. And in High School I didn't even have textbooks because they were too expensive for the school. So we didn't get to study from books, we had worksheets and learned a very acute amount of information.

As for the memory space, let's assume you carry 4 maybe 5 textbooks. At 2 Gb each, thats 10 Gb. But maybe you don't need all of those books every day. So just put the ones you need on that day on your iPad, and you're good to go. It's not like you have to keep every textbook you've ever used on your iPad for life. And I agree that 2Gb is a huge amount, and I doubt that every book will include that level of interactivity.

school sux

If only you could obtain a credible MBA via an ipad....

$15 for a ebook, but your broke ass student life savings to read the ebook. 

Instead of $100 textbooks, expect to see $600 ipad on your bill every year. why? you need that latest ipad8 to read that chemistry textbook!

and don't tell me Apple doesn't already do this, they disabled iOS5 gestures on my iPad1, I jailbreak it and it works perfectly fine. apple is evil.

"Instead of $100 textbooks, expect to see $600 ipad on your bill every
year. why? you need that latest ipad8 to read that chemistry textbook!"

Really? Strange that my iPad 1 can handle every book in the iBookstore even today.

"and don't tell me Apple doesn't already do this, they disabled iOS5
gestures on my iPad1, I jailbreak it and it works perfectly fine. apple
is evil. "

You would have an actual point if you weren't telling untruths and exaggerations. Multitasking gestures were never officially part of iOS 4. They were in the developer betas, although some people hacked them to work on their iPads. The initial iOS 5 release never had them for the iPad, so they were never enabled and therefore were never "disabled." However, Apple did include them in 5.0.1, less than one month after 5.0. You were impatient and took the illegitimate way, then you have the chutzpah to point fingers and call Apple evil?

Something tells me that this device would have been released at least five years ago, but people are concerned with preserving the publishing/textbook industry...It makes too much sense for it to all of a sudden be a new and big idea.

That's no secret. The book publishers make big bucks on paper books and strenuously objected to etextbooks as recently as a couple of years ago. How much do they make? A few years ago, an article on Leonard Riggio, the big cheese at Barnes & Noble, noted that an investor asked how he could sell a B&N dictionary for $20 instead of $60 for similar tomes like everyone else was charging. Riggio explained that it only cost him $3 per copy since he was dealing directly with printers and not publishers.

And then there's college textbooks where published professors reap in profits for the universities. I found this so appalling when I was in college, and I went to a public school...

Apple needs to do the responsible thing here & market hardware, not closed publishing software.

Its one thing to sell a product to willing consumers, but its quite different to extort/coerce underfunded schools into buying apple - priced hardware when cheap readers are already so readily available in the marketplace. The cost of an IPad is like 10% of the cost of an in-state SUNY tuition, and thats not okay. 

Also professors shouldn't loose the right to self-publish & translate course specific material in-house for cheap. 

It wont happen like that though, because the technology is already widespread and Apple wouldn't be able to patent anything.  

The cost of an IPad is like 10% of the cost of an in-state SUNY tuition, and thats not okay.

How much are regular textbooks as a percentage of SUNY tuition? I just looked up a calculus text I used in college. Current edition: $159. Add a few more books for other courses. Is having to buy more than $1000 worth of paper every semester okay?

Also professors shouldn't loose the right to self-publish & translate course specific material in-house for cheap.

Professors can do whatever they want. Take a word processing document on a Mac. Hit "print." Click on "save as PDF." Voila. Instant, free PDF lesson plan they can electronically distribute to students, since iBooks can display PDF files. You may also want to take a look at the iTunes University app.

Oh, and the word you're looking for is "lose."

What kind of a stunted intellect would construct an argument quoting someone verbatim and then complain about a spelling error?

Why would you advocate for common technology being solely controlled via monopoly by the least cost effective provider in a public school if these PDF's accomplished the task equally well? 

You like the IPad you gush about on comment down? Great. Leave the professional world to professionals, leave electronic communication open source, and go not watch a flash movie.

PDFs don't "accomplish the task equally well." You can embed multimedia only via Flash, which is fast losing support. iOS doesn't support it and even Microsoft says they won't support Flash in Windows 8 Metro. Android fanboys claim Flash is essential, but tech journalists note that it doesn't work great on Android devices and eats battery power like crazy. "Open" electronic communication? So where are these free apps to create free Kindle or Nook editions? If a professor really needs multimedia, what's to keep him from just creating a web page or FTP server? However, good luck looking at a web page or downloading a file if you really want to stick with paper books.

I notice you didn't address any of the points I rebutted.

Please show where in this thread I "gush" about iPads. I'm just correcting misconceptions and some outright disinformation.

it sucks that Apple gets a 30% cut of each textbook sold.

Kids can now search glossaries??? Yeah, books used to have glossaries, tables of contents, and indexes. I guess one out of three isn't bad for a first effort.

Text book chapters will now end in quizzes?? Wow. Ain't that something? I seem to remember chapters ending in summaries of topics, questions, and frequently quizzes. Once again, one out of three isn't bad.

But there are the advantages. It will be expensive, fragile and dependent on the grid for power and "updates". Despite the updatable abilities, you can be sure that the device, even if kept in near-pristiene condition, will need to be replaced after one or two years.

Awesome!

And further, they're removing some of the key methods of learning, like translating what you read into your own actual observations and ideas that you write down as notes in the margins of your book, or the way that the very act of transcribing facts onto flash cards helps you learn the material.

And further still, until we have a nationalized education system where all schools and students have equal access to learning materials, this is only going to increase inequities and the digital divide between poor school districts and wealthier ones.

That's an economic and political issue that needs to be resolved on a societal scale.  When i argue against inequality and unfairness, i always criticize the capitalist mode of production.  however, one can't concede that no advantages have ever been achieved in the current system.  It's not the new capabilities of technology that is the problem, rather, the problem is in the State's violent support of the oppressive means of producing those advantages.

Handwritten margin notes? That's so 20th century. iBooks has always provided the ability to annotate any text you want. That's using notes that shrink to the right margin when not in use, instead of forcing you to either write small or keep it brief because of the very limited space available in margins. Flashcards are good for rote memorization and nothing else. It's better to actually understand the material. I never used a flashcard in my life and still trounced most of my classmates.

Inequities? Have you ever been to college? If these kids can't afford an iPad, they likely can't afford the very expensive textbooks we had to buy every year. Those cost a hell of a lot more than $15, and that was decades ago. I don't want to think how much they charge nowadays.

Finally, hope at last.
 Its ridiculous to see little kids with heavy backpacks almost as big as they are.

It's also ridiculous to think about how many millions of trees are felled every year to make those books, which thanks to their hardback bindings, are not recyclable.