Last week, Apple pulled
the wraps off its latest offerings, iBooks 2 and iBooks author in a
publicised event in New York City. Whilst the announcement has proved
exciting and potentially world changing, digging a little deeper,
there's probably just as much to be concerned about as there is to be
contented about.
I'm just going to start
by stating the shallowest of my sentiments - this announcement is
darn exciting and will no doubt change the state of education and of
course, reading as a whole. But, , whether it will change education
and reading for the better or for worse is something we can't be
entirely sure of.
Ebooks are certainly
the next big thing in reading, but I doubt they'll ever fully replace
paper, not in our lifetime. We will always want books, I will always
want the option of an actual book, libraries will never just be
online catalogues. It's not about nostalgia at all, well maybe a
little, but certainly not all of it. The reason why books have lasted
so many centuries as a technological medium for knowledge
distribution is because they simply provide so many practical
benefits which are irreplaceable through technological innovation.
Dieter Bohn of The
Verge recently published a lengthy feature titled 'Sorry iBooks,paper books still win on specs', which outlines all the books
practical benefits which can't be ported digitally due to the very
limitations of technology itself. Here's a few crucial ones: books
don't crash, books don't run out of power, books have a consistent
user interface, books are compatible with every nook and cranny of
our daily lives.
Sure eBooks exhibit
traits that are impossible for paper to ever adopt, but that's how it
is, books and ebooks are just compromises of an impossible optimum
which is why we still need both.
To play the nostalgia
card by saying that there is a nothing quite like curling up with a
good book, turning paper pages and the smell of an old book isn't
really worthy of awarding a point to the good old traditional book.
For the most part, these claims are distorted by a desire to cling
onto the past.
People are always
afraid of adopting unproven things and letting go of the past,
especially when it's something like the binded book which has served
us so well for countless years. In the hypothetical situation that
the world regressed from iPads to paper books, we'd look
nostalgically back at the swift beauty of swiping to turn a page and
puke at the thought of touching paper.
But then again, I feel
that eBooks do have the capacity to devalue intellect. Despite being
a grace to the spread of knowledge, the fact that it is now so easy
to publish books with iBooks author and distribute them freely, it is
no longer really special to have a book published under your name.
Additionally, it potentially makes it harder to find genuinely good
books, and easier to stumble across one that someone may have simply
published for a school project.
In many ways, it's
comparable to what email has done to letters, making it easier to
receive and dispatch letters, yet also a lot easier for spammers to
get to you. And perhaps also what blogging has done to traditional
paper journalism.
On the education side
of things, I can't be one hundred percent certain that interactive
iBook textbooks is truly what education has been looking for. iBook
textbooks are indisputably a preferable alternative to the fat
textbooks of today - interesting, useful, engaging, it's all there
for the iBook textbook. What's concerning is having the iPad in class
at all.
There's a reason why
cellphones are generally not permitted for use in class despite their
potential utility as a learning tool. It's because electronics are
distracting; pair that with the fact that learning subjects that a
student dislikes is boring and you have a fairly tasty recipe for
procrastination, in class texting, and Facebook-ing. Interactive
books will never make a student interested in a subject that
inherently bores them in the same way that playing Halo won't make me
a fan of guns.
Apple's interactive
textbook is a double edged sword, empowering engaged students to
learn in new and better ways, but for the kids who aren't really
engaged in the first place, it's just a brand new way to get away
from class. By trying to emulate the quick access and fast paced
immediacy of current technology in the new interactive textbooks,
we're also emulating the negatives – the constant contingency to
lose focus.
If we want to fix
education, we can't simply implement books that move and talk, we
need to change the curriculum so that students don't have to do
science or math if they simply don't give a sh*t.
Interactive textbooks
aren't a step forward for education, but more like a step to the
side. IBooks and eBooks are a step to the side for reading too,
another alternative that is appropriate for certain use cases but
can't replace paper books which are appropriate for other use cases.
I can't really sum this up any better than Dieter Bohn did in his
article on The Verge, but if we ever want digital to become the
dominant medium for books, we need to make sure we can try recreate
at least some of the better things about paper into electronics.
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