Ipad Textbooks

The IpadIn a move that is set to possibly further annihilate the Kindle and other e-books, the Ipad is looking for an edge in the highly profitable text-book market. Just recently, Seton Hill University, which is a Catholic University in Pennsylvania, announced that every student at their university would be given an Ipad.

As the NYT pointed out, the IPads, which the university hopes students will use to download textbooks from the I-Bookstore, are not cheap. Each student will be required to pay a $500 fee for “digital costs” per semester.

When the Ipad was first announced earlier this year, the CEO of McGraw Hill announced that McGraw Hill would publish textbooks for the Ipad. Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillian, and Hatchett Book Group also made announcements that their textbooks would also be available for the Ipad platform.  While many believe that the Ipad will be a better platform for textbooks than the Kindle because of its ability to display images in color, little is known yet about the relative costs of textbooks for each of the devices.