College Textbooks Hit iPhone, iPod Touch
PC World – “College students could soon be able to ditch their backpacks and put their textbooks into their shirt pockets thanks to a new program that will let them read their books using iPhones or iPod Touch devices.”
This is FANTASTIC news to me. I have attended college and/or university part-time for the past 18 years.
The number of books being lugged around in my backpack over the years has caused both by back and neck to suffer.
I’m almost completed my time in school, but for future generations this will be huge!
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I don’t know that the etextbooks will prove to be a viable option for college students, at least not all of us. I think the tangibility of actual textbooks has it’s own value. Being able to write and highlight in the book, being able to skip around the book quickly and skip to the index if necessary are all things that you lose with the etextbooks. And I understand that textbooks can be expensive, and cumbersome to lug around, but there are ways around both of those. To combat the prices I always use the textbook search engine http://www.bigwords.com (which has their own iphone app now btw) And if you don’t want to lug all your books around all day, get there early and find a good parking spot and only carry the book you need for the next class. And one more thing that textbooks are the iphone isn’t – durable! I can imagine a lot of iphones getting broken if they are treated the way a normal textbook gets treated.
Very interesting concept. I’ve always thought this could be a promising application for the education market.
Would be great if the application had some value-added functionality, like the ability to highlight sections, tag passages with notes.. and of course to *listen* to the textbook, while you drive, workout, etc.