Amazon has announced it plans to make a push into the education market by introducing Kindle Whispercast, a service for centrally managing all the Kindles used in a system. The online retailer faces off against Apple, which has been firmly entrenched in the education market for quite some time and shows no signs of losing steam. From the early days of the iMac to the latest iPads, Apple has made huge efforts to embed itself in the education market, especially K-12. Several years ago, Apple launched iTunes U to allow anyone, including formal educators, to create interactive course material for the iOS. Apple also launched iBooks on the iPad to allow students to replace all those heavy textbooks traditionally carried in a backpack. Plus, Apple has provided easy-to-use tools for creating courses for iTunes U and has the biggest textbook manufacturers starting to create versions for iBooks. But Apple’s strength has always been the hardware its ecosystem runs on. Apple is a hardware and software company, but it’s not really a content company.
Enter Amazon and the Kindle. Let’s face it, Amazon is the content king. You can find almost any book published for purchase on Amazon’s website. And now most of those books are available in the Kindle format. According to Forbes.com in an article recently published, a BBC interview with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos confirms that the Kindle is sold at Amazon’s cost, so the company breaks even on the hardware. Amazon does this solely to get the hardware into people’s hands so it can sell them content.
The problem that has plagued Apple from the very beginning is the lack of central administration tools or the lack of capabilities built-in. Popularity of the iPhone and iPad made Apple improve that flaw and these devices have led the way in consumer technology entering the business world. Amazon has gained a large foothold in the marketplace for devices to deliver its content with the extremely popular Kindle line and now the Kindle Fire line of Android-based devices. Amazon has already been testing Kindles with students in kindergarten through twelfth grade in recent years and now it is going full throttle. Amazon will sell Kindles at even more of a discount than getting it for cost and is introducing its new Whispercast service.
Whispercast allows a single administrator to control all the Kindles in a system. Kindles can be customized by grade or class and they can even disable non-educational distractions like Facebook and Twitter. Amazon has plans to enable the control of apps on the Kindle Fire.
Amazon is a little late to the game that Apple has led for years, that is, getting product into the hands of kids who become buying adults in the future. The question is whether Amazon can deliver on the amazing central management it’s promising and only the market can decide that.
It will be fascinating to see how this plays out…
I am the bookbuyer for a small university in Colorado, and also act in an advisory role with a local charter school for their text purchases. Like many “book” people I have been highly resistant to moving to electronic texts and I wasn’t in the minority as all of our research has found that the vast majority of students and instructor still would rather use physical texts then electronic. However over the last two years the wholesale costs of textbooks have gone up more than 30%, with a sturdy hardback textbook averaging over $100.00 a copy. Add that the average textbook only has about a year of self-life, which means that a book in the end only is useful to a handful of students at best, the cost ratio per copy simply makes no economic sense.
Which is why even, as a “paper” person, I have to applaud the Kindle business model for education. The readers are solid and fairly damage resistant, sold at cost. The content can be controlled from the Internal IT level down to the individual instructor, depending on need. And most importantly the actual content of the text is provided at a much more reasonable cost, while allowing nearly unlimited options for ancillary materials (maps, videos, sound clips, test banks). As far as I can see it is a win/win situation for everyone. The publishers and authors sell books, the schools can afford them and the students are provided with a wider selection of material in an easily accessible format.
I love books, the smell of paper, the feel of the pages, just love them. But even more than I love books, I love smart, well educated kids. Amazon’s (and yes, Apples) model is an excellent step towards providing students with a great education without breaking the bank.