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Inkling: interactive textbooks on the iPad. (inkling.com)

65 points by shadytrees ↗ HN
Four textbooks available so far: http://www.inkling.com/about

Having used Raven's biology text, which is a good textbook but would've tremendously benefited from something like this because of how much data you need to retain for biology, this makes me pretty excited for THE FUTURE.

33 comments

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shadytrees
Four textbooks available so far: http://www.inkling.com/about

Having used Raven's biology text, which is a good textbook but would've tremendously benefited from something like this because of how much data you need to retain for biology, this makes me pretty excited for THE FUTURE.

wmf
It amazes me that this information is so hard to find on their site.
nanairo
Wow! This is really impressive!

It seems all that we were promised for the age of the ebook and then some! It looks like a product of love and plenty of polish.

My only worries is that they may risk becoming the artisan version of the ebook (on iPad) world: wonderfully handcrafted, but slow to scale. By the look of it porting a book to Inkling is not trivial!

I'll keep my fingers crossed for a great future for Inkling. :)

mhb
It looks great, but what makes this different than a (curated) walled garden section of the internet?
ra88it
Is somebody arguing that it is different?
mhb
The implication of this being news is that they're demonstrating something new. It may have escaped the notice of some, but I thought it was pretty well-established that you could use an iPad to surf the internet.
exit
i wonder how this is implemented. as a browser for local html archives?
todayiamme
I am in the target market for this and something disturbs me. It looks so great and neat that I wonder what will happen to the noise to signal ratio. I am not exactly the Buddha in terms of concentration and the last thing I want is to be plugged into an interactive environment (the app itself and the iPad). I'll play around, have urges to read a million things at a time; do quizzes; watch videos; write notes to share instead of writing them to learn and in general do everything on it, but learn. What makes it even more dangerous is the fact that it looks like I am learning something.

That's the problem with a lot of products I see. It's not that I don't have a use for them. It's the fact that I don't want to get used to them. Sometimes, the bare bones is just how things should be. Of course, it's awfully convenient to have things in this package, but it won't serve the purpose that well.

This is why I plan to buy the color kindle someday, if they come out with a decent system to take annotations. It scratches my itch for books with an occasional physics/ math/ computer text, while offering me an environment I can curtail. Hopefully, someday I will have more fine tuned control over myself, but until then I plan to stay away from such things.

scott_s
This is a legitimate problem, but not unique to this product. Anyone who uses a computer to get work done already deals with this.
xtacy
I haven't tried it; can people comment about iPad screen resolution and how readable it is? I've seen those magnified pictures, but how easy is it on the eye?
ptomato
Far better then a desktop/laptop, not quite as good as a kindle for text, though very usable, much better than a kindle for graphics.
muhfuhkuh
I can literally stare into the thing for hours: reading books/articles, surfing, watching video. It's makes no further strain on my eyes than does an LCD monitor (though, full disclosure: I use a P-MVA screen, which is supposedly "better quality" as LCDs go), and I _have_ to look at that for hours a day for my work.

I think the people who don't like looking at the iPad screen for more than a few minutes base their patterns on personal or ideological beliefs, or are personally invested in another platform like OLED or e-ink (i.e., fanboys).

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kurumo
Is nobody bothered by the prices of the actual books?
iaskwhy
I can only see the price of the biology book, $149.99, which is cheaper than the paper one, $178.75 on Amazon[1].

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Peter-Raven/dp/0072921641

ashearer
That brings up the 7th edition for me, while the app is based on the 9th edition. The 9th edition hardcover price is actually cheaper than the 7th edition, at $154.00:

http://www.amazon.com/Biology-Peter-Raven/dp/0077350022

But the "in-app purchases" section of the App Store page lists the online price as $119.99, so online still works out substantially cheaper than the new hardcover. I'm not sure where the higher price came from.

Regardless, you can do even better at other sellers or used if you're willing to get the 7th edition of the hardcover. At other sellers linked from Amazon the price goes down to about $100, and the used price is around $5. (Amazon does make this more difficult by displaying a lot of noise in the form of other books named "Biology" by different authors, even though the URL specifies "Biology-Peter-Raven".)

Edit: App Store web page for Inkling with textbook and chapter prices:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/inkling/id379351586?mt=8

mortenjorck
$0 of which you will get back at the end of the semester.
iaskwhy
Honest question: how do you get money back from an used book over there? Around here it's unusual to sell school books when they are not needed, people I know just give them like I did so I'm wondering if it's common to sell them or if there's some program which let's you return the book for some money (which could be an interesting business if it doesn't exist yet).
jasonkester
All through University, I'd buy my books used and sell them back to the student bookstore at the end of the semester. Pretty much everybody did this. You generally get about 75% of the used price back.

Towards the end of the semester, when beer money was running low, there were always tough choices to be made. A lot of those books would have been useful to have around today, but pressing needs prevailed.

mortenjorck
Yeah, there were always a few books that passed the keep-test for me. The best was this lovely Gartner's Art Through the Ages visual history that was a quite a challenge to lug to class but has had a permanent home under my coffee table for several years now.
ra88it
No. The prices seem to be less than the paper versions, and the books can be purchased per chapter. Seems like a good start.
xtacy
I was at a Peter Norvig lecture recently and he talked about ideas for his next book, to have it interactive with videos and such. He said that this would be a great way for authors to get implicit feedback from readers and see which sections they're reading and what they're not. (Analytics for book authors!)

Imagine having a lisp shell right next to the exercise so that you edit the program, execute it and see the output! The possibilities are endless---it just has to be done right.

EDIT: One of the main reasons authors stick with publishers is that they cannot handle mass printing. It becomes just too difficult. With this model, it would be easier to distribute the content directly to the user, rather than dealing with a (possibly grumpy) publisher.

rodh257
Sounds great, but would be better on something with a better (ie more readable) screen. The application needs to be device agnostic.

If these guys can come through with the goods, it would be ideal: http://www.notionink.in/

Make it a HTML or something app so people with other devices (windows, android tablets/ereaders) can make use of it. (perhaps an idea for a startup would be a website/program that lets content producers create these without HTML knowledge. That is, a builder for interactive HTML5 based text books.)

jforman
The platform was actually designed to be device agnostic - the content is expressed in X(HT)ML.

The iPad is our first target device because Apple did tablets right. You'll have to wait to see what comes next :)

rodh257
Oh I see, I just saw the link to the app store and assumed.. So you are saying that it is easily ported to other devices, but still requires a native application? What requirements stop you from making it an online thing, that people could use with their home computers as well? Or is it just a personal preference?

Nevertheless I like the site and the idea.

chwahoo
Based on the website, this looks awesome. But it would seem to compete fairly directly with iBooks. It's bound to be a time-consuming/costly process to prepare content for this platform. I wonder how inkling has convinced themselves and their partners that Apple won't pull the plug on their venture.
nanairo
I don't see why Apple would pull the plug. Sure, the app store has its problems (and I dislike those too) but it seems to me their only danger is that they are competing with Apple directly.

There is already Kindle and iBooks... and there may very well soon be more. I don't think Apple really cares that much, who sells the books. Especially if, as in this case, they still get their 30% share.

hartror
Now all you need is Windows 3.11 and one of those newfangled CD-ROMs and you too can run Encarta!

    or
The 1990s called and they want their ideas back!

    /end_sarcasm
This looks like a nicely polished product, the major barrier to uptake is going to be getting someone to use it as part of the syllabus. Difficult given that it will require the school to require everyone who takes the class to have an iPad.
ben1040
This looks like a nicely polished product, the major barrier to uptake is going to be getting someone to use it as part of the syllabus. Difficult given that it will require the school to require everyone who takes the class to have an iPad.

Not exactly. One of the books listed there, for example, is a popular text I had for an intro biology course at my university. To me, it seems more that if your professor has adopted one of the books, you can buy the iPad version instead of the dead tree copy.

As an aside, I wish I had an iPad version of that biology text when I took that class, if only because it was a monster book that weighed down my backpack.

hartror
Ahh I didn't realise that they were existing text books!

The very pretty video didn't highlight that point, perhaps they should be pitching the front page video to customers rather than investors?