McGraw Hill VP bullish on $399 iPad 2 for students
At Apple's education keynote in January, McGraw Hill Education was announced as one of the partners in the initiative to move textbooks to a digital format. The company's vice president of new ventures, Vineet Madan, is impressed with the power and display of the new iPad, but says he thinks that the newly discounted iPad 2 gives more schools a chance to deploy iPads to their students.
In an interview with Talking Points Memo, Madan said that "I've long thought that the tipping-point price for a tablet is between $200 and $300. Now that the entry-level iPad 2 has dropped by $100, and it's now $399 for a 16 gigabyte version, we'll see much more uptake."
McGraw Hill currently has five K-12 textbooks available, as well as over 50 iPad textbooks aimed at the higher education and professional market through partner Inkling. Although the existing e-textbooks use interactive features, Madan feels that the new iPad's Retina display, 4G network support and 10-hour battery life can make life easier for textbook readers and creators.
Speaking about LTE, Madan said "You could be anywhere and can immediately pull up all sorts of high-res, data-rich content. You can stream it instantaneously and you don't have pulling down gigs and gigs of content and storing it on the app locally." Madan also sees the high resolution Retina display as a way to "really unlock the potential of 'pinch to zoom' functionality" in textbooks.
