Today in my Media in a Diverse Society class, our professor told us that many of the large universities are working with publishers to get our textbooks in iPad format. He said that if it went through, iPads may very well become required for all classes with textbooks. It may even become part of the tuition. As a test run, a certain class in our media building have been given free iPads.
Say what you will about Apple's computers (I'm a PC guy), but if this goes through, it will save me so much money if they make them cheaper than hard copies. It could backfire, and the greedy publishers who charge an arm and a leg for a book filled with errors could make the eBooks rather expensive.
Though some would argue that this would lead to people playing games on their iPad instead of taking notes, one could say the same thing about laptops. My laptop is already a vital tool with my note-taking. Our grade got free versions of Microsoft Office Professional 2010, and I use the program OneNote to take notes in the easiest way possible. If someone develops an app that would work similarly for the iPad, I could see carrying it around with me to class.

Where to start with this ..... I'll give it letters.
a) course books can usually be bought second hand so people from less "well off" families can buy 100 books for the price of a single iPad + can be resold the year after so there's wouldn't be such a big loss, would there? Plus, eBooks have never been sold for that much less AND can't be resold.
b) I often had to quickly browse through a book to find a certain paragraph. I often recognised a certain page because of a picture or a certain layout - especially during studies. eBooks have their most notorious problem there and for just book reading, it's a small one ... but for STUDY books, it's a MAJOR one. Flipping through pages is a lot slower and sure you can use bookmarks but you can't bookmark EVERYTHING.
c) the iPad has a smaller screen compared to regular course books. These were large to allow for detailed graphs, schemes, etc. Yes, you can zoom in but having to scroll around is far from ideal, is it?
d) anything technological can fail. Books can't unless you put a match to them. If you got a serious test and your iPad decides to say "fuck you", you're screwed. Letting it drop or having the power die on you or whatever is a very realistic possibility.
e) restricting any format to iPad only shows a heavy bias and possible undercover funding from Apple because there's no reason for this. The proper way would be to make it an alternative NEXT to regular books AND release it in a standard format like PDF instead of giving Apple yet again another proprietary format they can fuck you in the ass with. There's already netbooks and others that are even more capable of this yet they're not given the attention - this would be illegal in many European countries.
f) theft. No-one is going to steal course books. Get your iPad stolen and you lose all your course books AND your iPad and if a thief knows a school will enforce the use of iPads, it becomes a gold mine for them. You'll see daily thefts of them because someone will always be more careless with them because people will be forced to carry them everywhere. A bag with books you can leave unattended but an iPad? It's a big sign that says "LOTS OF MONEY FOR THIEVES".
g) A big one: NOTES. Some course books I covered in notes from the first to the last page, often squeezing tiny script between lines or in the margin. I'm sure they'll find a way to let you do that on the iPad but it will never be as fast or as easy or as productive.
h) It's fiddly in class. No, seriously, this is a big one as well. Turning a page everyone can do in a book but when you got to zoom, flip virtual pages, etc. it's a lot easier for someone to get lost, or accidentally open another book, etc.
i) typing on a touch screen is about half as fast as on a keyboard if you're a fast typer on both. I can type 300 characters a minute - most people I've seen with iPhones or iPads can type maybe 100 or so with 150 really being the top. In classes, I would really really hate this because the auto correct function would really screw you over sideways there, renaming key words it won't recognise to something completely different. Correcting would mean you suddenly are way behind.
j) a HUGE one: iPad and iPhone screens are not comfortable for reading text for long periods of time - especially not considering the small size of the devices. eBook readers are popular for a reason and people are delusional if they think eye strain can be so easily discarded. eBook readers are made for this after all.
No, seriously, what Mac fanboytard came up with that idea?

I'd go so far to say that's it's almost certain prices will increase if this goes through. The college textbook industry is already a complete racket, and giving these folks even more control (removing ability to resell textbooks, along with the ability to kill access the moment the semester ends) will just give them leverage to jack up the prices even further.
And then there's simply the shortcomings of the medium. The iPad (and other e-readers for that matter) simply don't have enough screen real-estate to make glancing between the text and relevant visuals as easy as it is with the dead-tree version. Plus I haven't yet seen an implementation of electronic textbooks that makes it easy to do something as simple as jot down notes in the margins or highlight particularly relevant bits of text. And then there's the issue of useful textbooks actually being kept, used, and loaned out to colleagues for many years to come (I still do this with some of my chemistry texts), all of which becomes much more difficult when the textbook is tied to a particular device. Basically it looks to me like your university has a lovely little clusterfuck in the making, and it isn't going to be a cheap one either.

it's discrimination

Oooh yes, people think that game DRM is bad, I'd not be in the least bit surprised if the textbook publishers turn out to be worse. I'm thinking that "all universities have campus wifi so therefore it'll be a ubisoft style permission to turn the page" system and you're fucked if you want to study on the bus or somewhere else.
Less hysterically, I REALLY think they'd do a subscription instead of a purchase, after all you usually only use textbooks for one subject so renting it for a year (at only 25% over the old price) would easily do the job for a student and if they fail the subject or if the book is relevant to a different subject, they can always buy it for another year.
Now releasing textbooks in PDF/Kindle/ipad format to give people the option would be great, moreso if they were able to fulfil the magical promise that removing the physical aspect would REDUCE the price...
Bwahahaha sorry, couldn't keep a straight face there...

This idea had to come from someone who is a professor in "Media in a Diverse Society".
You, eh, won't see this in engineering school, I can tell you that. Books packed full of equations don't work too well in e-format.

No. It's pure idiocy.

No kidding. This Mac fanaticism is going too far. At work, my superior refuses to upgrade my computer because he's one as well and told me "I don't invest in PCs, only Macs" despite his Macs costing three times what a PC of the same power would cost *facepalm*. He'd rather have the company buy licenses we already own AGAIN because they're PC only now, just so they would all be Macs. THAT is how far it's going. It's lunacy!

Disgusting

Last time one of my superiors tried this HIS boss got an anon letter from someone detailing how much he was costing the company with his predjudices 2 weeks later we had alot of new pc's and a new boss.. wish i knew who'd done it at the time they deserved some free drinks

Like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere

I told the daughter of the boss yesterday what my superior has been up to.
Since we bought a $2000 iMac a year ago, it's been crashing daily and our IT support company was unable to fix it and told us to send it back to Apple but we couldn't miss it for even two days and Apple were known to take a LOT longer than that so we let it be.
Then a month and a half ago, my superior was going on holiday for two weeks and my colleague had to replace him using her own iMac (he took his Macbook Pro home with him for some weird reason). Because of the crashing, he said, I'll get you a new iMac! I said, shouldn't we try to fix this one first before blowing another $2000? Note: my PC cost $500, is 4 years old and urgently needs replacing. No, he said, we'll just buy a new one.
So a week later, we got a spanking new iMac which is slightly faster than the old one. He left on holiday the day after, and then we discovered the HUGE amount of issues with the new Snow Leopard OS. People not used to working with Apple software: they're worse than Microsoft when it comes to new software. Tons of very big problems remained in the OS which were at Apple's end, mostly dealing with permissions, network problems, etc.
So after 10 hours of our IT support company trying to get our software going, contacting Adobe, contacting Apple, etc. they were told by Apple that it would be fixed in an upcoming patch and was a known problem. Great. We got the old iMac with all its old software erased, and a new one that was buggy as hell.
So I did the only thing I could do: I reinstalled the old iMac ... and found the problem. Apple set the fan speed WAAAAY too low, causing the graphics card to overheat, causing the artifacts on the screen and causing the crashing. Note: the iMac was always up to date and this was never patched. Apple pretended it was not their problem and blamed the user. Despite this, tons of people reported this problem and I found a simple program that let you increase the fan speed. Whereas the screen used to be very hot before, it was now very cool to the touch. Problem fixed.
But, my fantastic superior had now spent $2000 that was unneeded. And we're left with an iMac that can't be used for work until Apple fix their mess. So yesterday I told the daughter how pissed off I was to see an expensive over-priced toy standing there unused when I had to work in badly outdated hardware and he wouldn't let me order a new PC!
So yeah, screw Apple and its fanatics, seriously. For all the shit Microsoft get, even the unpatched Vista was stable as a rock and would run all the software we could throw at it.

Personally I find that pretty stupid, not just because I don't like Apple, but mostly because the iPad is a very crappy eBook reader, it's screen is good for watching video or web surfing but definitely not for heavy reading.
There are lots of cheaper and better eBook reader out there.

If you look at the reasons people panned vista suprisingly few come from crashes (apart from those with nvidia cards as NV decided developing the drivers wasn't important till after the sales release -.-). Most complaints seem to stem from speed and how slow it was and most of that came from Intel being dicks and getting the requirements lowered because their IGA's would have failed to pass i.e no intel graphics powered system would have been certified.

Why not kindles? They are much better e-book readers, much cheaper, lighter, etc..
Sounds like jumping on the bandwagon to be cool.
That said, I think in 5-10 years we'll have $50 tablets with the capabilities of both kindles and ipads.. and a lot of us will probably have one for each member of the family.
Ipads seem great - just 8 times too expensive for what they are. (not very portable electronic magazines)