By Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed
Microsoft jumping into the tablet market with the Surface is a good thing for education. Maybe a $500 tablet (although the Surface looks to be more expensive) is part of the productivity equation of higher ed. We can’t drive down tuition prices, but your computers that you do so much of your learning on will be cheaper. The tablet of tomorrow is the textbook and coursepack of today. Once tablets become powerful, cheap and ubiquitous we will finally be able to move from paper to digital text materials – curriculum that is multimedia, constantly up-to-date, and socially enabled. Digital textbooks should even be cheaper, as the publishers will no longer need to build into the price the losses they face in the used textbook market. Cheap and powrerul tablets might even open the door for new publishing models (bundled, open source), new players (beyond the publishing industrial complex), and niche authors and titles (the long tail of textbooks).
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