"MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked be

"MacInnis sees Apple as possibly up-ending the traditional print publishing model for the low-end, where basic information has for many years remained locked behind high textbook prices." It's a nice dream, but it probably won't be what will happen. Not at first, anyways. Text-book publishers will continue to charge what they think the market will bear. They will completely ignore the fact that the cost of text-books is often spread over several students and several years via the used book market. With no used print editions available and perfect reproductions of texts available for "free", students will turn to piracy in droves. Then the publishers will blame the platform for encouraging piracy. This might not happen if publishers recognize that digital editions, if priced cheaply enough, might still bring in the same amount of revenue since every student is now forced to buy a new version of the text. I'm not hopeful that this will happen though. Many subjects have text-books whose position in the universal cannon is unchallenged. They're so good, so well respected, or the competition so poor that practically everyone uses them to teach. Other subjects have no real cannon text-books because no single text has managed to distinguish itself. Other subjects are simply obscure or esoteric enough that professors tend to take a DIY approach to the course text, with wildly varying results. In any subject without an established canon text, a suite of digital text-book creation tools could be a great boon to writers. DIY texts that prove good enough to have broad appeal will face greatly reduced barriers to wider use. Of course, when you can deliver text-books to profs for the price of an email's bandwidth, it's going to become very hard to choose good course texts! Content creation tools are a great thing, but I hope somebody out there is working on content filtering tools for text-books too!