Video courtesy of wythtech

The other night I had discussion with friends about the cost, weight, and bulk of high school and college text books. Our daughters are the same age and we’re getting ready to send them off to college in a few years. So, the issue is more than academic (pun intended). My friends are avid Kindle DX users. I’ve been reading ebooks on my iPhone and, more recently, the iPad. Our consensus opinion is that while the ereading experience is well suited for reading fiction, it is not yet quite right for reading reference books like text books. Even minor problems like the lack of mapping physical page numbers to Kindle (or other ebook reader) sections can pose a problem in a classroom environment.

Then, I happened upon a new iPad app that may point the way to the future of e-textbooks.

Inkling 1.0 (iTunes App Store)

The app itself is free. However, there is a fee for specially prepared multimedia text books. These ebooks can be purchased in-app as either entire books or chapters. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a price break for buying these multimedia ebooks compared to hardcopy books. The biology text, for example, costs $119.99 while the marketing text book costs $79.99. However, if you take a look at the video embedded above, an Inkling multimedia ebook provides a number of advantage over traditional hardcopy textbooks as well as conventional ebooks.

The Inkling ebooks appear to provide a reasonable way to navigate to various book sections. This is relatively difficult to do in current ereader apps.

Inkling’s approach to e-textbooks is provides me with some hope that ebooks may be not only a viable alternative to hardcopy textbooks but also a better alternative.