Do we want textbooks to live in Apple’s walled garden?

Ask any college student if he or she thinks that the dead-tree textbook industry is a racket. I'd wager that 99% or more of those asked would say "yes."

This is an area ripe for a shake-up. It has been for decades.

Granted, the iBook Author EULA is pretty intense. I'd also venture to say that public school systems are not the ideal institutions for such a play.

Consider private institutions of primary, secondary, and higher education, as well as public colleges and universities: In these venues, the student, or his/her family, is responsible for the cost of textbooks. That amount can be huge. The high cost is the result of a lack of competition. The lack of competition is due to the barriers to entry that are bolstered by the textbook publishers.

Given a student body already well-armed with iBook-compatible devices (likely today), it seems to me the overall cost for educational materials (textbooks) will decrease significantly.

If a given author is unhappy with the iBook Author EULA, then I suggest that he or she publish their content as a PDF document. PDFs can be consumed easily on iOS as well as many other platforms.

In the case of independent PDF publication, the author loses the distribution power of Apple's marketplace, but they gain the right to distribute their work how they see fit, to the best of their ability.

I think the iBook Author EULA is stupid and petty, but I think a lot of people are missing something important: It doesn't apply to works that are distributed for free.

Consider this in the context of Connexion (http://cnx.org/), which provides a community where people can share and curate CreativeCommons-licensed textbook modules.

Is the $8B (or whatever the number was) spent on textbooks annually actually money well spent? Most of the underlying content of most textbooks changes very slowly so the textbook publishers do what they can to generate churn so they can sell new versions.