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Check out Inkling

A new iPad app reinvents the textbook for the twenty-first century Over the last few years that Ive been following the evolution of digital publishing, Ive been consistently astounded by whatever it was that came next. When I read about Inkling and saw the video demonstration showing how it worked, I was once again amazed by the huge leap this iPad app is taking. Inkling has taken the concept of a textbook and turned it into an interactive resource. You can select chapters from an index, preview them as cards (CEO Matt MacInnis exand then read them at your leisure. The content of chapters contain hyperlinked text and pictures which bring up additional resources such as glossary definitions, enlarged views of illustrations, and even interactive diagrams. One other interesting aspect of the Inkling textbook is that you only need to pay for the chapters that you need. So, if your professor only assigns you certain chapters out of the textbook, you will save money. I have to say that Inkling has gotten their app perfectly right. Instead of viewing their publications as single entities, theyve reassembled them from their basic components: text, graphics, multimedia. They have also taken a book from the world of music and iTunes and offered that option of downloading a textbook a chapter at a time. This is similar to the option which iTunes give us to download a song at a time so we dont always need to download the whole album.

Discussion
Ive downloaded the Inkling app and Im looking forward to trying it out on my iPad. What do you think of this new addition to the electronic publishing world? Will Inkling make you more likely to purchase textbooks as ebooks?

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