After seeing Apple's earnings yesterday of over $13 billion for the last quarter of 2011, I'm even more troubled when I think of last week's announcement of iBooks 2 and the company's move into distributing text books.
For years I've been a proponent of the idea of using ebooks for school texts to reduce costs and make it easy for kids to keep information close at hand without lugging huge books around all day.
The first thing that bothered me about the iBooks announcement was the idea of a proprietary format for school books. If we are to use tax dollars to buy texts, I'd much rather see them distributed in an open format like Epub3. Using iBooks locks us in to Apple as a vendor just as using MS Office, locks us in to paying Microsoft. iBooks means buying Apple iPads for every student and then buying books through Apple's store.
With Apple's cash horde now just shy of $100 billion I'd like to make a modest proposal. If Apple wants schools to use iBooks and iPads they should give every public school student in America a free iPad. If the company set aside just $20 billion and we assume its cost for a $500 iPad is about $350 or less that would cover about 55 million tablets. Data from the 2010 census indicates that there were about 51 million students aged 5-18 enrolled in the US. This would be a great time for Apple to get into philanthropy in a big way. Free iPads and lower cost books from the publishers (since they don't have to actually print and ship books anymore) and we will indeed be further ahead.
Yes it will cost Apple a bundle of cash up front, but they would also be developing a huge population of future customers. On the other hand we could just go with open standards and forget about iBooks.
Thoughts?
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Never gonna happen
A guy can dream though
They did something similar with the original "Apple for a Teacher" program when the Mac first came out. It gave teachers a Mac and an Imagewriter printer for 50% off. It was a huge success in the 80s
+Sam Abuelsamid dreams are good and needed
Why give away something for free if they (schools and students) will just go out and buy iPads anyway? Wouldn't Apple be vilified if they they gave away iPads? People would say that they were trying to "hook" people onto their system, sort of like giving away "free drugs" so as to make addicts out of people? They would probably do it if it weren't for the political/antitrust risk of giving away a product. Congress would hold hearings and the DOJ would sue apple for trying to under-price a product, killing the competition. "Monopolistic behavior" it would be called in the DOJ suit. Tim Cook would have to testify to Congress. I'm sure he's looking forward to that. NOT.
+Sam Abuelsamid I like the idea on its face, but as a proud owner of exactly one share of AAPL, I'm excited to see such high number. The prospects for future growth are definitely compelling. I paid $1000 last year alone on text books. If you ask me, Apple's solution could be way more effective than the current monopolistic structure set up by Houghton Mifflin/HarperCollin/Prentice-Hall. About the proprietary format, I too would rather see more open options, but we are already forced to go through specific publishers to get what we need, so it couldn't be that much worse.
I believe the legal term under which Apple would be prosecuted if it gave away iPads is called "predatory pricing." Google and its licensees, Microsoft and its licensees, and BlackBerry, would be running to the antitrust division of the department of justice so fast… Senator Mikulski would call hearings…
and this is why it will never happen. Greed. No one is going to prosecute Apple for giving money to a school especially since most of them are broke. But you better believe that stock holders would be mad