Digital-Textbook Design Formula Proves Elusive

NYTimes.com:

"The most complicated form in print media is the textbook,” Josh Koppel of ScrollMotion explained to me. “You have a 1,000-page math text with 10,000 more pages of homework assignments. You’ve got the graphic side, the text side, notation, assessment, remediation. And we need to make this all live well digitally without being subtractive.”

Early this year, a consortium of educational publishers, including McGraw-Hill; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; and Kaplan, signed up with ScrollMotion to produce their products for the iPad. In trying to nail the tablet-computer design, Koppel has papered his office wall with old baseball cards, tears from Montgomery Ward and Sears catalogs (1880s and 1960s), a military edition of Thomas Beer’s “Mauve Decade,” the final issue of Weekly World News — the most inspired text and graphic solutions from years past. He says his fear, as we shift from analog to digital textbooks, is that some content — and with it some culture — will fall by the wayside. “This is what we have to fight: ‘Oh, we lost another thing!’ ” Koppel says. “Pretty soon nobody even knows we’ve lost it." ...