(2010-08-20) Inkling Ipad Textbooks

InkLing, started by ex-Apple employee MattMacInnis, has a system for building IPad-based Multimedia Text-Book-s, and is working with Mc Graw Hill. Books are available by-the-chapter as well as in entirety. (Chapters can have value as more-narrow Learning Object-s for people not using the Text-Book for a class.) I wonder who's developing the Multimedia bits.

Course Smart LLC, a joint venture of five higher-education publishers founded in 2007, released an iPad app for its nearly 14,000 college e-textbooks several months ago.

Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., for example, is giving iPads to 1,800 students this fall.

Aug24 update: more from Nick Bilton, who has seen his ITP students using IPad-s in class.

• One unique feature the service offers is the ability to discuss passages of a book with other students or professors. Just using the web instead of closed EBook formats, with Paragraph Addressable linking, can get you pretty far... (You could have the book be in EPub, with each paragraph having a little link to a browser-based paragraph-specific Discussion Forum thread.)