Inkling

“There is no future of the digital book — not the way we envision it today,” said Matt MacInnis, the founder and CEO of Inkling, the San Francisco startup that’s re-conceptualizing books for the digital realm.

He’s right. Tablets and e-readers are unraveling the publishing industry as it’s existed until now. More than 12 percent of American adults owned an e-reader as of May, according to a Pew study, and 8 percent owned tablets.

But the books being read on those devices were conceived originally for print. Words and ideas have been designed to fit on the physical page. Even for those books that do include videos or audio recordings, they’ve typically been added as afterthoughts, or as ancillary pieces to the primary content.

“It’s not even close to maximizing the potential of the tablet,” said MacInnis said.

While tablets and e-readers duke it out for the market share, Inkling is working on blowing out the digital book as we know it. Though the company started by digitally rendering existing print textbooks only for the iPad — currently, there are about 100 book titles — it’s poised to become a major player in the publishing industry. But rather than creating content, the tech company will provide the platform that can transcend any device, whether that’s an iPad, a Kindle — or even a laptop.

BEYOND EDUCATIONAL BOOKS

Currently, all of Inkling’s titles are in education, but it’s starting to dabble beyond that market.

Inkling engineering is being used to create digital books out of blogs. With licensing from Inkling, Open Air Publishing just released a new cookbook, Food52 Holiday Recipe & Survival Guide, derived from a blog written by former New York Times writers Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, and another called Speakeasy Cocktails. Both titles have received rave reviews for their luscious images, explanatory videos, and ease of use. “The multimedia features elevate it from a how-to guide to something rivaling a small group class,” writes Mashable.

Inkling also produced the epic The Professional Chef by the Culinary Institute of America. The book in its entirety costs $50, but you can also purchase individual chapters for $3 a piece. The new model makes book buying much like buying music — choose only the pieces you like best.  MacInnis fluidly demonstrates how to float from one chapter to the next, launch videos, close in on images, tap on sidebars and recipe instructions. It’s like watching a magician performing sleight-of-hand tricks.

But the books Inkling has created thus far are what MacInnis calls a “means to an end.”

“It’s all a way for us to illustrate for the world what’s possible. Simple things like rendering images into 3D, we can scale pretty well. But when you get to thinking about the hierarchy of knowledge you have to traverse in order to be an expert in a specific topic, you start to build the book very differently than you would have done in print,” he said. “We can take a textbook to an Inkling title in six weeks, but we can’t create a pure Inkling experience in six weeks, because there’s no shortcut.”

Inkling

Inkling is in the midst of producing multiple projects that will take years to create because they’re building native digital content. “You’ll see stuff that will be much more beautiful and much more interesting in structure,” he said, though he would not elaborate further.

TABLET OR E-READER?

“Everything we’ve done is platform agnostic,”  MacInnis said. The underlying information allowing the iPad to render, for example, the 3D molecule in its science books is not specific to the iPad. “It’s a piece of software for the iPad, but there’s another piece of software that will be able to render that in a Web browser or in a different device.”

MacInnis is keeping a close eye on the tablet and e-reader market, but he points out one very obvious extension: “We’re constantly looking at the world of digital readers, the Nook color, Kindle Fire, some of the Google devices. It’s all super interesting to us,” he said. “But there’s one device that everyone has, which is a laptop.”

That means when Inkling launches books for other platforms (though the timing has yet to be determined), all the content it’s produced until now — everything from Erik Foner’s history book Give Me Liberty! to the just released Living With Art — will instantly be available in these other platforms, too.

COMING TO K-12, TOO?

Though most of the titles under Inkling’s belt are geared for higher education, MacInnis sees the K-12 market as ripe for the medium. “We fully expect that Inkling will be in the K-12 world,” he said. “It’s already in use in that space, and we plan to make ourselves known to that audience more aggressively.”

Inkling currently works with Pearson, McGraw Hill, and WW Norton, all of which have titles in K-12 space. And private prep schools use Inkling titles for their advanced placement courses. “They’re deploying the technology already, making substantial investments in devices, so we’re being very opportunistic about it,” he said.

But what happens in the K-12 realm depends on what publishers decide to do. “What features the Inkling platform supports — monitoring and reporting, the sorts of things you need in a controlled K-12 environment — we may or may not choose to do depending on where the market pulls us,” he said.

THE VALUE OF DIGITAL IN LEARNING

As lovely as they are to behold and consume, the million-dollar question is whether Inkling books provide more value to the learning process than print books. The company addresses this in different ways, allowing for easy searching, for social-networked note-taking and highlighting to allow for robust group discussions online, and quizzes and self-assessment tools so learners know when they’re ready to move on to the next chapter.

But is there any evidence showing students actually perform better using Inkling books? “We want to get better at understanding the real measurable educational outcomes that occurs as a result of using inkling,” MacInnis said. To that end, the Virginia Department of Education recently conducted a program that showed students using Inkling books improved their A.P. scores over the course of an entire year faster than those that didn’t, according to MacInnis. “Anecdotally, it shows that there’s some positive correlation,” he said. “But that’s if higher SAT outcomes is what you’re going after.”

What’s the secret sauce? Any number of factors: It could be because it’s easier to carry around one device rather than a stack of books, easier to access lessons on-the-go, and of course, what MacInnis refers to as “just straight-up engagement.”

“We’re using media that’s more familiar to this generation,” he said.

Inkling

Whether it’s the iPad that will shake up the print book industry, or some other tablet, it’s evident that education textbook publishers are going to have to adapt to the digital world.

Since the iPad is still the front-runner in the education realm, publishers have to learn to think of it not just as another medium for reading. They have to completely rethink the way content is consumed. And they’re looking to the pros – the engineers — to show them the way.

At the moment, it’s Inkling that’s trailblazing the path to re-conceptualizing the college textbook.

“The iPad is not a book. Too many publishers pretend it’s a book,” said founder and CEO Matt MacInnis to ReadWriteWeb. “We have gently disassembled the textbook.”

What makes Inkling’s apps unique is the fact that “content isn’t bound by pages or sections or chapters in the same linear fashion. Rather, it’s hierarchical, richly illustrated and augmented. It’s interactive. It’s social,” Watters writes. The digital versions include quizzes, interactive infographics, and a scrolling and searchable interface.

The San Francisco-based startup has grabbed the attention of the media as well as of leading publishers in the industry. In March, the company received a round of funding from Pearson and McGraw-Hill. By fall, Inkling plans to have about 100 of the most used textbooks available. The apps will cost about 20 percent less than print books, and students can purchase individual chapters for $2.99. The company’s also planning to offer the product in an Android version, the Google operating system, according to the New York Times.

Here’s what’s on the agenda for Inkling next fall:

The top 100 undergraduate titles from McGraw-Hill Higher Education

A comprehensive MBA curriculum, featuring 24 of the most popular business titles, from Pearson Education

A full line of medical textbooks, featuring Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, an imprint of Wolters Kluwer Health

Top undergraduate arts and sciences titles from Pearson Education

Top medical education and reference content from McGraw-Hill Professional

As far as how many students have crossed over to the digital side, at this point, it’s a chicken-or-egg question. E-textbooks made up only 2.8 percent of total U.S. textbook sales in 2010, according to the Times. Some students say they’d be willing to invest in a gadget like an iPad if half of their textbooks were available in digital editions, but exactly when that time will come, perhaps only Inkling has an inkling.

Nature Education, the educational wing of the Nature Publishing Group which also runs Scitable, one of the largest science publishers in the world – is hoping to resolve this with the release its first ever science textbook.

It’s called the Principles of Biology, and for a $49 lifetime access, students receive a constantly-updated biology textbook, for less cost.

The textbook is a result of a partnership between California State University and the Nature Publishing Group, who’ll be working together to create what they’re calling a “born digital” textbook that will be used at CSU campuses beginning in the Fall of 2011.

As a digital product, Principles of Biology will be accessible to students and instructors via the Web — both on desktops and on mobile devices. Those who buy the license will also be able to print a color copy of the textbook.

The textbook includes more than 175 interactive lessons, as well as continual assessments to help students master various fundamental concepts in biology. The book will draw on the expertise as well as on the archives of the journal Nature.

The Nature Publishing Group says that it will offer more titles in the future geared to life and physical sciences. These books will also be developed in conjunction with the faculty at CSU.

Gerry Hanley, Senior Director for Academic Technology Services at the CSU, Office of the Chancellor, said in a statement that this book is a step towards transforming the traditional relationship between universities and textbook publishers” Like Inkling books, this is entirely digital, not just a transfer of a print version to an e-book. But this sort of academic and publisher partnership is important to note — not just because it marks a way for students to receive up-to-date content, but because they can receive that content at a discount.

The publishing industry at large is going through a tremendous change due to the increasing popularity of e-books. And the textbook industry, long the target of complaints from students resentful at shelling out hundreds of dollars for books they’ll only use for a few weeks, is ripe for disruption.

By offering students the ability to access the materials online, at a deeply discounted rate and with the knowledge that this material is continually updated, the Nature Publishing Group might point the way for other publishers to follow. It’s not just about providing students with the content they need, it’s about finding a model for digital content that makes sense.

Flickr: Smithsonian

Last month, the digital textbook startup Inkling announced that it had secured a new round of funding, including investment from the two biggest educational content companies in the world, McGraw-Hill and Pearson. I spoke with CEO and founder Matt MacInnis about Inkling’s iPad app and the company’s plan to re-imagine the textbook.

Textbooks on Inkling’s platform aren’t simply the print versions converted to the tablet screen. Content isn’t bound by pages or sections or chapters in the same linear fashion. Rather, it’s hierarchical, richly illustrated and augmented. It’s interactive. It’s social. It’s not really a “book,” per se, but something that, due to the iPad’s format, feels new and different.

During our interview, MacInnis said something that struck me as particularly interesting. I asked him about his team, because, unlike many other companies that are working to digitize textbooks, Inkling isn’t a spinoff from a major publisher. He described his team as engineers, not publishers. Digitizing textbooks is an “engineering problem,” he said, not a publishing problem.

Employing engineers and not publishers has helped Inkling rethink what a digital textbook on the tablet could look like — unfettered by the constraints of printed textbooks or by the constraints of hundreds of years of the history of what a book “looks like.”

This begs the question: does education (and education technology) need more engineers? The answer — at least to the ed tech question — is a loud “yes.”

The technology industry in general is suffering from a shortage of engineering talent. While unemployment remains a problem across the country, the tech sector seems to have the opposite problem: the inability to find enough skilled programmers.

With some of the big names in the tech world engaged in lavish recruiting efforts — huge bonuses offered by the likes of Google, Twitter, and Facebook — some small startups are struggling to fill job openings.

Add to that the relatively marginalized position of education technology, and the problem may be more pronounced. So yes, ed-tech needs more engineers.

But the call for more engineers is also a call for those who can bring not just skills from the technical aspect, but fresh perspectives and cutting-edge technology to the sector.

Though education technology companies have been criticized for not having enough educational expertise, Inkling’s success has demonstrated that the engineers’ perspective brings a new way of bridging this important intersection of education and technology. The same may be said for online gradebook LearnBoost, a startup with an engineer-heavy staff. LearnBoost is not simply re-imagining how a gradebook works but is a leading contributor of open source code. (LearnBoost is certainly the top education company on GitHub as measured by project followers, and they are one of the top companies overall along with Facebook, Yahoo, and other.)

“Education technology has traditionally been light on the technology side, making ‘edtech’ a bit of a misnomer,” says co-founder and CEO Rafael Corrales. Unfortunately, he adds, “when you think of innovation, you wouldn’t think to look towards education technology companies.”

Having more engineers in ed-tech could foster a substantive leap forward in innovation — in both education and technology. Too often the software designed for schools lags behind consumer tech. It’s clunky and it’s ugly. By bringing more engineers to work on education, we can build better applications. In turn, students and teachers get to benefit from the best and most innovative technology. And when cutting edge technology evolves from the education technology sector, the status and appeal (and recruiting power) of the whole industry could be elevated.

Re-imagining education may not be an engineering problem (though some do argue this point, too). But re-imagining education technology certainly might be. How do we recruit engineering talent and convince programmers to work in education? We’d love to hear your thoughts!