• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, January 12, 2012

I just dropped a few hundred dollars on Amazon for two slim and one fat volume of college material that shouldn’t have cost more than $50 total in any rational market. As the parent of a college co-ed, the healthcare-like costs of higher education are now so beyond plausibility that the numbers are beginning to seem made up. And I am a recovering academic myself. I know the rationale for higher-ed costs, from the limited scale of academic text printing and distribution to the actual unsubsidized cost of running institutions. Even I think this is crazy.

Since my daughter has an iPad, I tried to press the idea of using Kindle versions of the texts. Apparently, some of her classes forbid electronic devices. At any rate, the savings was not pronounced. I am hoping Apple comes up with something for us this month. According to the invite sent out for its January 19 event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple will do something regarding education. “Join us for an education announcement in the Big Apple,” says the invite, reproduced on The Loop site.

The expectation among the usual Apple polishers (pundits) is that we will be seeing some new project for texts revolving around the iBooks platform.

After all, according to Walter Isaacson’s less-than-insightful (sorry, I couldn’t resist) bio of Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder saw this multibillion-dollar-a-year industry as “ripe for destruction.” He saw the iPad as a solution to heavy texts. He wanted textbook writers to create digital versions, and he had already had meetings with textbook makers like Pearson. Per Isaacson, Jobs said: “The process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt. But if we can make textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent the whole process and save them money.”

Well it may be too late for me. Jobs seems to have had in mind primary and secondary textbooks, not the staggeringly overpriced and underweight tomes I just bought for my daughter.

It is curious to me that Jobs had education in mind all along when it came to the iPad. The first generation of Tablet PCs followed a similar, if unsuccessful path. In the decade that the stylus-based platform struggled in the market, Microsoft kept trying to impress on students what a convenience a Tablet PC could be for note-taking and even lecture recording. No dice. Students generally didn’t take to it. And Gates' vision of a computing “revolution” really didn’t seem to embrace publishing so much as computing.

Will the mighty weight (not to mention the reality distortion field) of Apple finally get educational texts digitized and portable? That might be all we can hope to see in our lifetimes. Sanely priced? Methinks that will have to wait for another generation.