Filed under: Books in General, Conference/Event, E-Books, Innovation, Publishing | Tags: Business book summary, business books, Innovation, Publishing, Technology
The press is all abuzz about Thursday’s Apple announcement at the Guggenheim museum in New York. While rumors have been circulating for weeks, two reports seem to have an inside scoop worth noting.
The Wall St Journal reported yesterday that Apple is working with education publishers to transform textbooks, and of course this will happen on the iPad. But ars technica added a twist to the story by releasing information about a “garage-band for e-books”, software that will be available for any author or publisher to use to create interactive textbooks.
This new development, if true, could indeed transform the textbook industry and the educational process. Not only will these new “iTextbooks” allow students to interact with the content, they will also open the way to social engagement around the information. Students will be able to add content, links and notes, and share this information with fellow-students and teachers. Each textbook will thus become a platform for learning rather than a one-dimensional text.
We’ll all get the scoop on this new innovation tomorrow, but in the mean time this has me thinking about the possible implications for business books. Up to this point, business book authors have had limitations as to how they could innovate with their books. Some authors have connected the printed text to websites where interactivity can take place.
But imagine instead that this interaction can now take place right in the book itself. There’s no reason that this “garage-band for e-books” can’t be applied to business information as well. Imagine that you’re reading The Performance Pipeline by Stephen Drotter and you want to implement his concepts to move work more efficiently through your company. Managers at each level could have a copy of the iTextbook, and as they read through it they could take notes and share them with other managers. The book could also provide a framework for implementation that could be filled in by the managers as a plan takes shape.
This could make any business book transformational within a company or organization, as the ideas take on life within the company. And for personal success titles, tools could be provided to help an individual learn and implement the principles in their daily life.
At Soundview we’re already on our way to implementing this type of learning environment with our iPad book summary that includes text, audio and video components. But we too could use that next step of software to help with the interactive piece. Let’s see what Apple can deliver.
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Reblogged this on U4596730's Blog and commented:
Comment by u4596730 January 18, 2012 @ 2:31 PMTechnology of course change everything in the future