”As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability, durability, interactivity, searchability, and currency — the book earned a big red X. Curiously, Schiller didn’t let his earlier observation of the antiquity of books undermine his critique on the grounds of their durability; not only the technology of the book, but many actual tomes survive from Gutenberg’s era; and when older formats are taken into account, far older books are still with us. It is comparatively difficult to imagine an iPad of today, much less an app designed to run on one, still in use two hundred, five hundred, a thousand years hence.

Matthew Battles: It doesn’t take Cupertino to make textbooks interactive » Nieman Journalism Lab (via ayjay)

As much as it would be nice to have the textbook industry shaken up, Apple’s approach to this is all kinds of Wrong.