Textbooks.
Love ’em, hate ’em. Lots of content (often too much) at prices no one would pay unless they absolutely needed to. Like for a college course.
Today, however, Amazon announced its launch of KPD EDU—
…a new segment of Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) designed to help educators and authors easily prepare, publish, and promote eTextbooks and other educational content for students to access on a broad range of devices, including Fire tablets, iPad, iPhone, Android smartphones and tablets, Mac, and PC. Educators and authors can use the public beta of Amazon’s new Kindle Textbook Creator tool to easily turn PDFs of their textbooks and course materials into Kindle books. Once the book is ready, authors can upload it to KDP in just a few simple steps to reach students worldwide.
Apple’s iBooks gives authors the tools to do the same thing, but it’s a closed platform: you need iBooks software to create or read the books. If you’re a Windows user, you’re out of luck.
Amazon’s Kindle, though, is available as a hardware device, of course. But Amazon also has Kindle apps that run on MacOS, Windows, smartphones, and tablets–pretty much anything.
Since authors will have the ability to create, publish, and distribute through the Kindle platform, this opens up content creation opportunities to a much wider audience.
This is going to be a big deal–and a good deal for educators and students.