Raising the Bar with Inkling’s Textbook Features

Last week, I had the privilege of sharing Inkling with a few hundred forward-thinking technology journalists, enthusiasts, and CEOs at The Wall Street Journal’s AllThingsD conference. That day we also shipped our fifth major release for iPad. During the 12 minute presentation, I shared some of what makes Inkling a powerful new approach to publishing and, indeed, to learning itself.

I began by showing some of the key features that raise the bar for textbooks:

• Support for high resolution 3-D object rendering and annotation
• The ability to peel back layers of complex visual information by tapping
• Images, text and web links visually anchored to words and objects
• A redesigned Inkling Store, making it easy to explore our growing title library
• An easier and more familiar login experience using Facebook

Of course, all the stuff you’ll only find inside an Inkling title is still there, like our interactive quizzes, the ability to purchase by the chapter, Test Yourself exhibits, a really powerful search engine and social note sharing, to name just a few.

And we’re happy to report that we’ll have over 100 fully-enhanced, interactive titles available this fall, including some of the most popular titles for undergrads, MBA’s and medical students.

During the demo, I explained how Inkling’s approach to textbooks is unique in the industry. We’re not about substituting a glorified PDF reader for a paper book. We’re about replacing the “book” altogether with something more effective, more flexible, more affordable, and (dare we say it?) more fun.

Inkling builds textbooks that you actually want to pick up and read. Why? Because they are made from the ground up for iPad. No more digging into separate websites for extra content, or worse, missing out on that content–and the studying advantage it provides–because you rented a secondhand book. Inkling books are connected, searchable, interactive, and intuitive, just as you’d expect on an iPad.

If you haven’t experienced Inkling yet, version 1.4 is yet another reason to give it a shot. Every title includes a free chapter straight from the book, so you can try before you buy.

Here’s a video of the D9 demo. When you’re up on stage, it sure is nice to have such an amazing team behind me to make sure everything goes flawlessly!