I gave an introduction in Technology and Activism the other day to the Creative Commons. In that introduction, we (briefly) explored two thought problems:
[ music ] How long until you can own every song ever written? My first question had to do with music. If $60 buys a 500GB hard drive, you can put one year of non-repeating music on it. (I’m using the song Seasons of Love from the musical Rent to drive my calculation regarding the number of minutes in a year.) How long until hard drives can casually/affordably hold all music ever recorded? I put it to the students that they will likely see that day come within the next 10 years, at which point the way we consume music will certainly change.
The second though problem is much more interesting to me, however.
[ textbooks ] How much do you spend per semester on books? A quick poll of the class showed that the majority of the students spend between $250 and $300 per semester. Lets look at this picture:
A publisher gives me a book for free. I like it. I assign it to all of my students. They then buy it, sometimes paying $120 or more for a single text (Physics, Math, Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science… we all have runaway textbook prices that are crushing our students.) They send $300 every semester to the publishers. It is simple to see why publishers want DRM: they don’t want kill the cow that lays geese that lay golden eggs.
At a college of 2000 students, that means students are spending
$1,200,000
per semester on books. The college has no direct control over this cost, and there is no incentive for faculty to keep costs low for the students. I managed to offer both of my courses this semester using only Creative Commons licensed texts… but there aren’t a lot of those I can choose from.
The thought game became this: why haven’t small colleges come together and established a free press? They could hire an editor or two, some typesetters and indexers, and then commission books and short monographs and release them into the Creative Commons. Authors taking part could be rewarded better than any publisher could ever pay for this kind of material, and the impact on the educational world would be huge.
the ipad arrives
The iPad isn’t a revolutionary game-changer, but no doubt Apple did some things right with its design. It does web and video well, and it is possible to pay on a month-by-month basis for connectivity to 3G networks. (Nice if you’re going on a trip and just want roaming wireless for a month.) And while $500 sounds expensive, think about it this way:
$500 is $50/semester for device and insurance.
If an institution commits to ebooks—meaning, all the faculty agree that they will commit to finding electronic texts to teach their subjects—we can slash student book fees drastically. We raise the floor, meaning they have a mandatory $50/semester technology fee. However, we then have 2000 students with a wireless slate that can display video, play audio, surf the web (campus WiFi), display PDF, Google Docs, read email… the list goes on and on. To me, it seems like a very compelling vision.
In terms of the device, I don’t really care if it is the Apple iPad or not. If Steve wants to send me one to use and evaluate, he’s welcome to. I’m a Mac owner, have a Touch, and think this could be an excellent device. But I also know that Mary Lou Jensen has developed some incredible technology at Pixel Qi, and an Android- or Linux-based device could do everything I’m suggesting just as well. So, put simply, it is currently an exciting time for devices that are bridging the gap from laptop to slate.
Agreed with most everything you’ve written. The only issue with the iPad is it operates under the same rules as the iPhone (AFAIK), meaning you can’t get software onto it without going through Apple’s seemingly arbitrary approval process. In other words, it is mostly a closed box.
Why the bloody hell couldn’t they have enabled stylus use on the iPad? It’s a 486SX. It’s designed to maximize content consumption while minimizing content creation.
So you can’t take notes on it, you can’t draw figures on it, and you can’t mark up PDFs or books. At the risk of stating the appallingly obvious, I guess I’m not the market for these things.
My apologies.
In mentioning the iPad, I was mostly using it as a poster child for a very broad class of devices which will not grow more expensive over the next 3-5 years—they will become cheaper and more functional.
You can take notes on it, you can draw figures on it, and you can mark up PDFs. These are all things that the Touch/iPhone can currently do, and therefore so can the new Apple device. But, again, the particular vendor isn’t my point: instead, it’s that we have a $500 touch-capable device with ubiquitous wireless capability.
Relative to the cost of netbooks/laptops, the cost of paper, the opportunity cost of carrying large numbers of textual/video assets and being able to share/collaborate around those assets… the $500 price-point is rather striking, and other devices (as I mentioned in the last paragraph) will do the same, do it for less, and do it more openly.
Perhaps we do different things, but my day is full front-to-back, and I have a constantly shifting set of media that I need access to, some of it static (books, articles, video I’ve downloaded) and some of it dynamic (email, RSS of feeds from my students, etc.). I really want a device that lets me carry this information (and connectivity) with me at all times in an accessible and usable manner, and I maintain that the devices we’re seeing now actually make that possible. What we will see now over the next 6 months to a year are refinements, both in hardware and software.
I suspect you’re right in saying that the iPad is one of a wide range of similar devices that will proliferate. Which is great. But I’m still (as far as I can tell) waiting for the one that does what I want.
I want to get paper out of my life. Primarily because digital media is so much more powerful (I’m sad to admit that I could care less about the environmental issue). So it’s frustrating that I still can’t get rid of paper. There are three reasons I don’t use my laptop exclusively in lieu of paper, and the iPad only addresses one of them:
1. Inconvenient form factor. iPad addresses this.
2. Dot pitch is too coarse. Scientific papers have enough subsubscripts that I need ~1200×1600 pixels on a PDF display. Both the iPad and my MBP give me 750×1000 (unless I turn my laptop sideways). Frankly, I could probably grit my teeth and deal with this, but…
3. You can write on paper. You can draw precise little diagrams, and write equations with lots of fiddly subscripts. This is *not* possible with the Touch. You can draw a decent game of tic-tac-toe, if you have small fingers and you don’t mind it looking messy. I can’t see anything in the description of the iPad to indicate that it’s different from the Touch.
This makes me sad. I really want a device just like the iPad, on which I can scribble like mad.
Like you, I really want a device that lets me carry my information and my connectivity with me — but for now, that’s still my laptop, because what the iPad offers (cool handy form factor) doesn’t match what it gives up (keyboard, fully programmable, runs OS-X applications).
I presume you know about this:
http://www.freetechbooks.com/