This video of Josh Koppel, CEO of Scroll Motion, shows how their technology is being used to present Hearst magazines (including Oprah) on the iPad. It also shows their technology in a Houghton Mifflin math textbook, which looks particularly interesting to me.
I have long thought that this sort of technology can be and should be applied to law school textbooks. (In fact, I predicted it three years ago in Law School 2.0). Not all of law textbooks, but many of them. They could be so much more engaging and instructive. No, not all law students have iPads. But three print law school textbooks cost the same as an iPad, and those mostly contain cases that have been available free online for almost a decade, and at the end of the semester you can't play Angry Birds on them.
At the Future Ed 3 Conference at New York Law School last April, I gave a talk within which I said something that was interrupted by applause by the nearly 100 attendees. (That's never happened before, by the way). I said: "The classic law school textbook is a dinosaur waiting to die." The interesting question is: what will it be replaced with? The Skills & Values Series of hybrid (print and online) law school textbooks - described elsewhere on this blog - is as far as I have gotten in answering this question, and they are pretty cool. But this sort of technology - and similar like Inkling and Kno - has the potential to make truly engaging, useful, and more effective books for law school teaching.
Here is the clip:
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