I have written previously about my impressions of two electronic textbook platforms, CourseSmart and Inkling. Most of my impressions of each platform still stand: CourseSmart has a larger catalog, faithful preservation of the printed page, and lousy legibility; Inkling has better navigation through their ‘card’ metaphor that breaks each chapter into sections, excellent typography and graphics, and a small catalog of titles. I wanted to return to this issue again because, as with all things tech, the picture is evolving quickly.
Inkling just released version 2.0 of their platform just as classes are resuming here on campus, and they are touting the enhanced sharing capabilities as one of the major new features. I suppose if I were a better instructor, I would annotate my copy and share those notes with the world, but I tend to use the book much more as a reference, as I suspect do most of my students, so I’m not sure how critical this feature will prove to be in the sciences. But in playing with the sharing feature even a little bit, it seems too clunky for most of my students to bother with. It isn’t integrated with any existing social networks, instead offering an apparently random collection of users for you to follow, presumably because they have the same text. Alternatively, I could type in an email address to find a specific person, but this seems like reinventing the wheel when I’ve already done that elsewhere.
The big news to me is that, somewhere along the way, Inkling introduced the ability for instructors to request a free copy of one of their titles, which was one of the weaknesses I mentioned in my previous entry. Their hope is that by getting their product in front of instructors, they will gain a recommendation. This is no different than the rest of the textbook publishers providing free desk copies of textbooks for review. In truth, I placed links to all electronic versions of the textbook on my syllabus page this year, but Inkling was the only one I specifically called out on the first day of class, demonstrating some of its nicer features for the class. Why? It offers a great user experience, and it doesn’t expire.
Gravitropic 