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Textbooks today are still bought and sold in much the same way they’ve always been: as ink-and- paper objects assigned by professors and purchased by students in campus bookstores. "It’s a slow- moving pharmaceutical(制药的)market," says Matt MacInnis, the CEO of Inkling, a startup working on digital textbooks. "The professor writes a prescription, and the student goes to fill it."
There are already digital textbooks available, and their numbers are expected to grow. CourseSmart, a company collectively owned by five of the biggest textbook publishers, has 6,000 educational titles for sale in digital format. But its electronic books are little more than scanned versions of printed works. A CourseSmart e-book includes some neat functions, like search capability and digital note-taking, but for the most part, it has few advantages over a traditional textbook other than weight and price.
That’s where a company like Inkling comes in. Inkling and its competitors are working with the textbook publishers to bring their books onto the iPad, iPhone, and other future devices. The aim is to harness all the advantages of a multitouch, Web-enabled platform. That means chemistry students won’t just see an illustration of a benzene (苯)molecule; they’ll spin and rotate a three-dimensional model of one. Biology students won’t just read about the cardiovascular (心血管的)system; they’ll see video of a beating heart, narrated by a world-class heart surgeon.
Interactivity, though, is only part of the story. Bringing texts onto a digital platform provides an opportunity to make the book as social as the classroom. With Inkling’s technology, a student can choose to follow another’s "note stream," or view a heat map of the class’s most-highlighted passages. Professors get real-time information on how much of the reading assignment the class actually did, or whether a particular review problem is tripping up large numbers of students. All that comes on top of the cost savings: even these advanced digital textbooks will cost less than their print equivalents and some will even come "unbundled", allowing students to buy the individual chapters they need most for a small fraction of the cost of a full textbook.