There has been a recent movement in the textbook industry toward the digital market, and its becoming more and more appealing if you ask me. For those of you who have tablet devices, I suggest you check out Inkling, a company who offers interactive digital textbooks for iPad users. After watching a demo of what their digital textbooks can do, I was quite impressed to say the least!
Inkling offers users the option to buy individual chapters of a textbook. In most cases, you will not cover an entire textbook in the course of a semester and only really need a few chapters. It always seems like a waste to buy a 1500 page textbook and only make it through a third of the material and, in addition, buying only a handful of chapters that you need through this company comes in at a pretty low price.
At the risk of making this sound like an infomercial for Inkling, I’ll let you check it out, but the level of interactivity of the books they offer makes use of the tablet technology in a way that previous digital textbooks have not taken advantage of. If I was in my first year, I’d even consider buying an iPad for this!
Here is a demo of a book to show you what I’m talking about:
There are, of course, many digital textbook companies out there. The market seems to be a bit of a mess, but there are a few gems in there. Have you bought any digital textbooks you’ve liked? Lets hear about it!
