What We Write About.

E-books have been a grow­ingly pop­u­lar trend among adults and chil­dren for the last few years on tablets, such as Amazon’s Kin­dle and Apple’s iPad. As both com­pa­nies con­tinue invest­ing in brand devel­op­ment ini­tia­tives, the real power of these devices has remained untapped until recently.

When Apple first launched the iPad my ini­tial thought was, “finally, tech­nol­ogy that will help us get out of expen­sive, out­dated, heavy text­books and in to excit­ing and inter­ac­tive edu­ca­tional mate­ri­als.” I saw the poten­tial imme­di­ately and was ecsta­tic. The only prob­lem was that there was almost no men­tion of this until the release of the iPad 2. Sure, there were a few startup com­pa­nies excited for the new devel­op­ment plat­form and what this could mean for engag­ing our youth more effec­tively, but ulti­mately the cost to develop a sin­gle inter­ac­tive text­book was just pro­hib­i­tive. Why would any of the major text­book pub­lish­ers like Pear­son, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mif­flin want to invest that kind of money when the cur­rent sys­tem works? Plus, the tech­nol­ogy was still rel­a­tively new and untested. So, early adop­tion was prob­a­bly not even on their radar.

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