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Cult of Mac took a look at the size of the digital textbooks available on iBooks after today's education-focused media event. File sizes range from Pearson's 793MB Environmental Science up to a hefty 2.77GB for Biology.
- Pearson’s Environmental Science – 793MB
- National’s Chemistry – 959MB
- E.O. Wilson’s Life On Earth – 965MB
- McGraw Hill’s Algebra 1 – 1.09GB
- McGraw Hill’s Geometry – 1.22GB
- McGraw Hill’s Physics – 1.25GB
- McGraw Hill’s Biology – 1.49GB
- Pearson’s Biology – 2.77GB
For regular authors, Apple limits the file size of books created with the iBooks Author app to 2GB -- something that Pearson's tome easily exceeds. Unsurprisingly, major publishers get to bypass limits that the average author must abide.
Top Rated Comments
128GB iPads can't come soon enough.
Maybe Apple told them to make the books ready for higher resolution iPads? When they are going to announce a Retina display iPad 3, it makes sense to have all these things ready for it. Just a hopeful guess.
That's actually a pretty good idea... It seems like frequently teachers only teach select chapters out of a textbook, like, 12 chapters out of a 20 chapter textbook.
Or an image sequence of a virus infecting a cell. Lots of amazing stuff. And for most of this type of thing you want lossless compression so you don't lose details.
Ditto for Chem. Or Physics. Or Computer Engineering to zoom in on an entire CPU layout.
Think about a book on nano-tech too! Interactive exercises.
I can see why it might need to be large for many books - hopefully the size limits are bumped up for everyone eventually.
Pretty cool - gives lots of new capabilities. I think Steve J would've really loved that type of capability.
Not really. Schools aren't going to care about leaving space for students to have music and games on the iPads. Especially if they are school owned and loaned to the students. When you consider that most students are taking between 6-8 classes, a 16 GB could be exactly the right size for these texts which is all the school is going to care to have on the iPads.