Inkling is a new iPad app that sets out to provide ‘a new platform for interactive textbooks’. It looks terrific in its video demo – good enough to make you want to get back in school!
Inkling is a platform for interactive textbooks, built from the ground up for iPad. It turns paper-based textbooks books into engaging, interactive learning experiences while staying compatible with the print book for classroom use.
Here’s more detail on its features, via its App Store page:
Inkling is a completely new way to learn. It includes:
* The flexibility to purchase by the chapter or by the book
* Shared Notes that make it easy to collaborate with friends in realtime
* Integrated interactive media in every textbook title, such as movies, 3-D objects, and guided tours
* A simple and powerful user interface that makes it easy to study
* Interactive quizzes that help you immediately gauge your level of understanding
* An intuitive search engine that predicts your search as you typeAnd while it’s entirely new, it also keeps the things you love about the print book:
* All the content of the print edition, and a lot more
* Page numbers you can jump to directly
* Digital media you’d otherwise get online with a "code," integrated directly
The app itself is free and includes some nice demo content – in the form of an Inkling edition of ‘The Elements of Style’ by William Strunk, Jr.
I can definitely see this one being a hit in colleges, especially as the app’s publishers expand the range of content available for it.
If you want to be impressed, take a look at the promo video for Inkling here:
You can find Inkling in the App Store now, and it is a free app with textbook chapters available for in-app purchase.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Horrendously expensive text book prices. If the print prices are worse than this, it's amazing anyone can afford to go to college anymore. They were bad enough when I went to college 30 years ago. Today's prices are absolutely obscene.
They do seem quite steep to me too – though I don't keep up with what print costs are like at all for textbooks.