Kindle Self-Publishing eTextbooks Offer

The internet age has started to enable classrooms without walls, or even borders and promote the leading educators to engage with all students. But is this reality today or merely technology waiting to be adopted and adapted and fighting much educational technology inertia? We have the same curriculum and exams, but an often significant variance between how students are engaged, motivated, learn and achieve the standards sought.

Learning resources, such as textbooks help teachers to deliver the lessons, but can now technology allows them to do it smarter and more consistently?

One approach comes from, The Stephen Perse Foundation in Cambridge. They are a leading UK private school and the current ‘Independent School of the Year’, boast some of the best results in England and have announced that they are publishing 12 digital multimedia textbooks for IGCSE biology. The textbooks will be available to download free online from Apple's iBooks online store to use on iPad tablet and cover an entire exam syllabus. The course is currently taken by some 500,000 students in 160 countries.  They also plan to extent the list to cover other topics such as molecules and enzymes and animal nutrition and already claim to have had a significant market response to their 100 course they have made available through iTunes U courses.

Today Amazon announced another new approach via KDP EDU, or what they refer to as Kindle Textbook Creator. This is aimed at empowering all to create eTextbooks and other educational content that is enhanced with digital features such as notes, flashcards, bookmarks and highlights. Content can be prepared, published, and promoted as eTextbooks alongside and other learning material and all can be access on tablets, iPads, Android tablets and smartphones, Macs and PCs. This venture could therefore allow the best educational authors to do it themselves, to self publish and lead to an explosion of material and provide choice. But who will determine the good, bad and indifferent?

Kindle Textbook Creator claims to make it easy for ‘anyone to take any PDF and create a richly featured and widely available eTextbook.’ Kindle Textbook Creator will offer authors royalties potentially up to 70%, while keeping their rights and maintaining control of their content. They can also enrol their books in KDP Select for additional royalty opportunities like Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and access to marketing tools like Kindle Countdown Deals and Free Book Promotions. But are these potential extras real opportunities for this material, or false incentives to lure authors?

It is often said that each of us has a book inside us and self publishing is unlocking many of these today in the trade market. But does every teacher have a textbook inside them and will this start to unlock these or will the lure of the reward still deter the best to stick with the traditional route.

So which publishing model will prevail, the self published, the traditional, or the best school?   

Many big questions remain. How will Amazon police copyright, through the implementation of plagiarism-detection services and links to registration databases, to ensure copyrighted material, be it text, pictures, artwork, graphs etc doesn’t merely just get ‘cut and pasted’ into a new work. How will quality rise to the surface and will there be a mass adoption of ‘my textbook, teacher notes and associated material, or will the majority opt for the tried and tested and publisher underwritten option? Will a flood of resources effect the current pricing  and drive down or raise the cost of traditional material?

Today there should be no reason why the standard of education is governed by location, your purse or access to materials and resource. Yet education is still localised, standards vary and engagement is down to individuals. Facilities such as TED Ed and the Khan Academy are viewed with skepticism by many, some would suggest that the curriculum is more geared to robotics than to learning and the take up of technology varies significantly in spend, application and quality.

To learn more about publishing textbooks through KDP, or to download Kindle Textbook Creator, visit kdp.amazon.com/edu.

To learn more about The Stephen Perse Foundation’spublishing programme.

When Is Tablet and eBook?

We all know that there are a number of players focusing on the textbook market and Apple is about to join them. So it was refreshing to see a new Californian start-up called Kno that is aiming to make a splash with a new tablet aimed at the same textbook, academic reference and educational space. The tablet is a clamshell style tablet and folds together just like a book and the device has also been specifically developed for the educational market. The question is whether it can it compete with Apple, Amazon and the rest or will fade like others before them into oblivion?

The Kno has dual touch screen 14-inch LCD displays which are obviously larger than the competitors screens and which are joined convienantly at the hip. It will support Flash, HD video, audio recording and playback along with HTML5, and users can multitask between email, text the Internet and offers a stylus for handwriting recognition, and up to 8 hours of battery life. The tablet will be powered by an Nvidia Tegra processor and has either 16 GB or 32 GB of storage The device can also fold in on itself to turn into a one screen tablet.

Kno was founded by Chegg founding CEO Osman Rashid and Dr. Habib, a Semiconductor physics recognized authority in electrical engineering and the design of integrated circuits. They already claim to have entered into early partnerships with McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Wiley, and Cengage Learning
The tablet which is scheduled for release at the end of this year is no lightweight weighing in at 5.5 lbs and is expected to be ‘well under $1,000’.


The trick is to get the content and then get the devices seen as a must have. One maybe relatively easy, but the other a lot harder.