About Making The Grade: Every Saturday, Bradley Chambers publishes a new article about Apple in education. He has been managing Apple devices in an education environment since 2009. Through his experience deploying and managing 100s of Macs and 100s of iPads, Bradley will highlight ways in which Apple’s products work at scale, stories from the trenches of IT management, and ways Apple could improve its products for students.
A few months ago, I discussed why textbooks never took off on the iPad. I mentioned that it wasn’t a lack of technical support holding the iPad back, but rather a go-to-market problem. Once books were deployed to a device, that license was lost to the school. This situation made even $14.99 books seem expensive when you had to re-buy them every year (public schools own the books and then loan them to students). The business economics around the textbook industry has led to it becoming a relatively stagnant market in K–12.
