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  3. Apple developers aren’t the only ones who greeted the iPad’s release with gr

Apple developers aren’t the only ones who greeted the iPad’s release with gr

游客2024-03-06  28
问题     Apple developers aren’t the only ones who greeted the iPad’s release with gratitude and optimism. The textbook industry, too, sees it as a way to persuade customers away from the used-book market, boost profits, and help students learn better.
    Of course, it will not happen overnight. "It’s a slow-moving pharmaceutical (制药的) market, " says Matt Maclnnis, the CEO of Inkling, a startup working on digital textbooks. "The professor writes a prescription (药方), and the student goes to fill it." However, there are already digital textbooks available, and their numbers are expected to grow: CourseSmart, a San Mateo, Calif., company collectively owned by five of the biggest textbook publishers, has 6000 educational titles for sale in digital format. But its electronic books are little more than scanned versions of printed works. A CourseSmart e-book includes some neat functions, like search capability and digital note-taking, but for the most part, it has few advantages over a traditional textbook other than weight and price. That’s where a company like Inkling comes in. Inkling and its competitors are working with the textbook publishers to bring their books onto the iPad and other future devices. The aim, says Inkling’s Maclnnis, is to harness all the advantages of a multi-touch, Web-enabled slate. That means chemistry students won’t just see an illustration of a benzene (苯) molecule; they’ll spin and rotate a three-dimensional model of one.
    Last but not least, bringing texts onto a digital platform provides an opportunity to make the book as social as the classroom. For instance, a student can choose to follow another’s "note stream", or view a heat map of the class’s most-highlighted passages. Professors get real-time information on how much of the reading assignment the class actually did, or whether a particular review problem is tripping up large numbers of students. All that comes on top of the cost savings; even these advanced digital textbooks will cost less than their print equivalents and some will even come " unbundled, " allowing students to buy the individual chapters they need most for a small fraction of the cost of a full textbook.
    But what about the students? "Technology is never the silver bullet, but it can sometimes be the bullet, " says Diana Rhoten, an education researcher and cofounder of Startl, which invests in innovative education companies. She notes that different students have different learning styles. "In a digital book, I have all of those patterns available to me, " she says. " That is huge. Customization is going to have a great impact on learning. " And if it means getting an A in organic chemistry, paying $500 for an iPad seems like a smart choice.  [br] CourseSmart’s digital books have no competitive advantage except weight and price because________.
选项 A、it will take a very long time for CourseSmart to occupy the pharmaceutical market
B、CourseSmart digital books are little more than scanned versions of printed works
C、the search capability and note-taking function of CourseSmart need to be improved
D、the five owners of CourseSmart can’t reach an agreement on its textbook format
答案 B
解析 由题干中的CourseSmart和have no competitive advantage except weight and price定位到原文第二段第五、六句。细节辨认题。定位句指出，CourseSmart提供的电子书仅仅是印刷作品的扫描版本。虽然CourseSmart的电子书包含几项非常简洁的功能，但在大多数情况下，它们除了在重量和价格上占优势外，并无哪一点比传统教科书强。因此，B项“CourseSmart的电子书仅仅是印刷作品的扫描版本”符合题意，为本题答案。
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