iTunes U has been around for a while in the desktop iTunes app, but the new iPad app is awesome. There are some interesting courses taught by great lecturers at top universities. The quality of the video lectures that I checked out is very high.

The courses are free, so I assume the universities are not making money from iTunes U directly. So why are they doing this? Places like Stanford and Yale are capacity constrained – there are many more students who want to go there than can be accommodated. So their demand is high, and offering free courses in iTunes U probably isn’t going to bring demand down to the point where the capacity constraint no longer binds. This is because the iTunes U courses don’t give you any kind of diploma and you can’t get feedback on your homework.

So there’s not really any revenue loss for the university, and they get some nice publicity and a feel good factor. But for a less famous university that isn’t really capacity constrained, the effect on their demand could be more significant. So I expect to see mainly famous universities offering these online courses, as long as they are free. The happy side-effect is that this should also maintain the high quality of courses in iTunes U.

In the longer term I can easily see a charging model arise. Some of the courses I’ve sampled are so good that I would gladly pay around the same amount that I’d pay for a textbook. I’d pay even more if I could interact with the teaching staff.

It’s interesting that the license agreement contains a little fuck you Amazon … all books created with iBook Author must be sold via the iBookstore (if you give the book away for free you can do whatever you want).

As far as I know, Kindle has a much bigger share of the ebook market than iBooks. But iPad has a much bigger share of the tablet device market. It’s typical and expected of Apple to try to leverage its share in devices across to content by providing cool tools to content developers. And cut out the publishers in the meantime – very disruptive.

Seems like a good response would be for Amazon to release similar software for authors. Not sure if they can match Apple’s polish though.

Update: Josh Gans points out the author agreement is not quite exclusive, you can take the content produced by iBooks and assemble it in another program and sell it through another channel.

Publishers are clearly leaving money on the table here. Even if they cannot give up the dead tree model, they could offer something like iTunes Match for books and provide digital versions to people who have bought physical books. Or allow people to swap a physical book that they own for a digital version. Since the self scanning process destroys the book anyway and it sounds like a lot of trouble, people should be willing to pay something to exchange their physical book for a digital file. And since the publishers presumably already have the books in some sort of digital format, the marginal cost should be pretty close to zero. Sounds like a real win win is possible.