There's currently a massive push in Italian high schools towards bringing old and boring textbooks to the digital age. Right now editors are barred from making a print-only book: at least a portion of their books must be exclusively available online. Usually, only the most pointless, optional bits are stuck there, so that hasn't been a problem.
My mother teaches, and she's being caught in the crossfire: she's started teaching in one of the classes involved with the school's second round of pilot classes going digital-book only. The school leased her a Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 (actually -- the headmaster did. WTF? What if he gets transferred elsewhere, or dies?), and she's getting her complimentary textbook copies from the editors.
This is a goldmine of WTFs, and it begins with the pupils discovering about the program only once the school year started. Everybody had already bought the dead tree version of the books.
Meanwhile, my mother only has the digital version of this year's books. I'm helping her throughout, and it's been making me furious.
Book editors are supposed to, yknow, edit books. From what I understand, you get a gobbledygook mess of a .doc file from the authors, and spend a few weeks fixing the grammar and putting it in print form. Then you print it, ship it and have others sell it.
So the first order of business for editors is developing their very own fucking apps to read books. Finally, students will have to have a personal connection with their textbook editors by strongly resenting them every time they try to recall what jail they can find their philosophy textbook in, and working aroud the app-specific ways to work around how fucked up this specific jail is.
Let me tell you, those jails are a fucking disaster. Here's a screenshot of one from Mondadori. Click on it, and watch in its full resolution glory.
Those JPG artifacts? They're actually in the text. The entire fucking textbook is a bunch of JPGs. This app is a glorified image viewer, and it runs at 8 frames per fucking second.
There is not a shred of text information or metadata to be found: the only way to navigate is through the arrows, or by tapping on the page number, punching in a page number like it was fucking teletext, hitting Enter on the keyboard, oh of course that does nothing, you have to hit the "Go" button next to the textbook to actually go there, and it's on the opposite end of the 10" screen. Also, the textbox gives you a numerical keyboard for input, but what the app expects are the print edition's page numbering. The index is on page iii. You cannot navigate to the index. You have to use the bookmark feature to go to the index.
Of course all the app is is a poor excuse for a fucking proprietary DRM scheme. Pearson's own version of this fuckery comes straight up and tells customers you're only buying a time limited license to those books. And look at Pearson's app screenshots. Oh wow, it's got search! So long as you're okay with just finding the page number. Look it that! Unreadably tiny font! It may not look so on your glorious 22" inch monitor, but remember we are talking about tablets. I think the size at which Discourse embeds images matches a Nexus 7's viewport just about right:
Can you read anything without zooming in? I fucking can't. I guess I'm not in the SkillZone! Learning is hard, let's watch Rock School.
I don't know why my mother's 10" tablet only has a 800×1280 resolution when my much cheaper Nexus 7 is 1080×1920 (TRWTF is Samsung), but I can't imagine the tablet the students haven't yet received are going to sport any higher resolution. I thought one of the things editors were actually supposed to do was layout the fucking .doc in a format-appropriate way; who the fuck gives a shit about skeuomorphic Outlook 97 screenshots when you have to pinch to zoom on every single bit of text on a page and it's unbearably choppy as fuck to do so? This shit gets very old, very fast.
It's like your fucking book is stuck in a dusty glass cage where you have a couple knobs to "scroll" the page in the tiny plastic viewport, and if you want to annotate each page you can use some fucking transparency sheets, and you get a complimentary FREE magnifying glass you need to actually read what's in that fucking thing, and you're charging for this shit sandwhich as much as the regular, separate dead tree edition. Artistic impression:
Here is a clue: YOU ARE NOT IN THE BUSINESS OF MAKING ANDROID APPS. YOU ARE IN THE BUSINESS OF MAKING TEXTBOOKS. REFERENCE TEXTBOOKS THAT STUDENTS ARE SUPPOSED TO KEEP AND REFERENCE FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES.
If you can't fucking figure out how to sell DRM-free ePubs in a way that doesn't fucking run your company into the ground like other respectable reference textbook companies do (say, Manning or O'Reilly), YOU WILL NOT PRODUCE A FUCKING CUSTOM READER THAT IS FIT FOR PURPOSE.
Sell a fucking class license to the DRM-free book. Let people use whatever the fuck reading app they want to read your book. Let them change the fucking font size, for god's sake. It's not fucking complicated; it's a solved problem.
I tried to tell my mother that she should tell the editor reps "DRM free ePub or paper, grazie." Naturally, she didn't have any clue what that meant. I showed her a couple of books of mine. She saw the difference. Yet, she's powerless. She can't change the choice of textbooks for next year, and she can't wiggle her way out of this pilot program. If she tried to speak up, she'd probably get called out for being "stuck in the past" with things that just fucking worked. This is supposed to be a "pilot" program, but there doesn't seem to be a moment in which teachers can give feedback on how terrible this is — and after all, how are teachers going to realize when everybody's going to be using dead tree textbooks this year anyway?
Outlook is terrible.