[Leica] iPad and textbooks

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Frank is right about textbooks.  My daughter is in college and, while iPad
would not replace her MacBook, it could easily replace the 10 lbs of
textbooks she has to cart around in her backpack all over campus. That alone
would be well worth the price of the iPad. In fact, she would be able to
leave her MacBook back in the dorm more often if she could use the iPad to
study and write, then bring it back, sync with her MacBook and continue
working.


--Jim

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Why so many college textbooks at $50 a pop? Many colleges, including mine,
look for a magic number in evaluating professors for promotion. Our college
counts the number of papers published in academic journals as a major index.
Three peer reviewed papers equal one textbook. Judging from personal
experience it is quicker, and often easier, to write a textbook for
undergraduate courses than to do the research for a substantive paper.
Naturally the publishers want to sell co-pies of the books that they print
so the professors are encouraged to require all students to buy the latest
edition of the book. The iPad, using books accessed from the internet, will
kill that market. The colleges will be forced to use a different metric than
"Publish or perish."

Larry Z