iPads Replacing Textbooks

These guys are working on a tablet for education.

This news item from AppleInsider notes that Georgia is looking to put iPads in all of its middle schools, replacing all the textbooks. Other schools are testing this, and it looks like it will be a growing trend. Especially if textbook publishers ever get smart and embrace it, but that may require new publishers. College textbooks can easily run hundreds of dollars per quarter if you buy them new... enough to buy an iPad for one quarter's worth of books is not unusual at all for an engineering major.

Imagine that, once you have your classes, you could go to a page where you could download all your books to your tablet. Better still, how about paying maybe $50 each instead of $100 or more? Perhaps even less if the professors start putting excerpts in there from their own works, instead of full books.

A dream scenario for students, a nightmare scenario for textbook publishers bloated on decades of high prices. They will delay this advance as long as they can, but there's an opportunity for new publishers to step in and make a killing. I hope, for the student's sake, they do so.

And please note that this could mean tens of millions of tablets sold for students... on top of other tablet sales. Want to bet whether those students would be putting games on their tablets?