Apple’s new version of the iBooks app and the new iTunes U app for the iPad have the potential to change education by changing what textbooks are and how students use them. This was one of the projects Steve Jobs left unfinished.

There are currently only a handful of books available, all for $15 and with free sample chapters. (Download them from iTunes). There is also a free biology textbook. I downloaded the bio book and the sample physics chapters, and they were impressive, combining text, graphics, audio and video in a polished, multimedia volume. This wasn’t your typical primate’s physics book.

Page from bio textbook (click for larger image)

So far, Pearson and McGraw Hill are the only publishers, but Apple released a free toolkit for the Mac to create textbooks in their format.

The downside to all this is that the books run only on the iPad, which costs roughly $400 to $800. Many parents simply can’t afford to spend that. And don’t look to public school districts, whose teachers often have to spend their own money to buy basic supplies for their classrooms. That means these multimedia textbooks will probably start out in the private schools of the one percent.

The good news is the price of non-Apple tablets are coming way down, and school districts will be able to purchase them in bulk for about $10 each. They’re no iPads, but they’ll work fine for education. Until these are available, schools can still use tablets, but keep them in the classrooms.

Page from bio textbook (click for larger image)

That means electronic textbooks will have to be available in an open format that will run on non-Apple hardware, or Apple will have to make hardware affordable for education. If the textbooks I downloaded become a standard, this will be a real game changer.

We’ve all seen statistics showing how far American schools are behind the rest of the world. But if you remove the stats from American schools in poor districts, the U.S. is way ahead of everyone else. So to fix education in this country, either solve poverty in general – this won’t happen in my lifetime – or at least solve the poverty in education. If good education weren’t considered a luxury, everybody would benefit. If the U.S. spent 1% of the cost of the Iraq war on education, it would be transformational. Could you imagine the uproar if someone in Washington proposed to spend $30 billion on education?

One day, this will all be in someone’s multimedia history textbook.

In the last few years, multimedia (video) projectors have come way down in price, and gone way up in quality. If you’ve been putting off buying one — or maybe you know someone on Santa’s list who has been especially nice — here are some general guidelines that can help you decide what to get.

• Buy a DLP unit, not an older-style LCD.
• Brightness is measured in lumens; the more a projector has, the brighter the image. Minimum you should get is 2100 lumens, and 2500-3000 are increasingly common and can be used with room lights on.
• Like a computer screen, resolution is measured in pixel width x height. Bare minimum size to get is 1024 x 768 (a/k/a XGA resolution), but to if you want to be future-proof (read: more expensive), then get one that supports hi-def, which is 1920 x 1080. A projector that displays 1920 x 1080 and also supports the 1080p format is one you can use for Blu-ray DVDs. That’s what you’d use in a home theater.
• Some projectors are listed as “short throw”, which means they can display a full-size image on the screen from only 1 or 2 yards away. That’s great for doing demos or training or where space is tight, so you don’t wander in front of the screen and block the image.

There are many brands and models to choose from, but here are a few typical examples.

The BenQ W6000 has all the goodies, and will set you back $1400 at Amazon.com. Think that’s a lot? It wasn’t long ago that a device like this would cost thousands:
http://amzn.to/saaghE

For $500, you can get the Acer H5360, which is 2500 lumens and 1280 x 720 resolution:
http://bit.ly/vHboha

In between those two is this one, which goes up to 1280 x 800 resolution, 2500 lumens, supports 1080p and does short throw. Lowest price I found is $850:
http://bit.ly/v5kKgc

If you want to search on your own, a good place is B&H, which is a reputable place in New York. You can choose prices, resolutions, lumens, etc., and they’ll show you what’s available:
http://bhpho.to/d0mrfK

Rumor has it that Amazon will hold a press conference on Wednesday morning to announce the new tablet, so this is still unofficial. As I hear it, the new tablet will be called the Kindle Fire. It will have a 7″ back-lit screen, run a customized version of Google’s Android operating system, be Wi-Fi enabled and cost about $250.

Amazon will continue selling the regular Kindle, which uses an e-ink screen. The new model isn’t intended as a replacement.

How often does this happen — you’re out for dinner with friends, and when you get the check, several people don’t have cash and want to pay with plastic? Or maybe you want to split the cost with someone of a birthday gift. Or you have a small business that takes you on the road, or a side business selling stuff on Craig’s List, and people want to pay with credit or debit cards.

If you have a Droid, iPhone or iPad, a company called Square can make your life a lot easier. They provide you with a small, square card reader that connects to your mobile device. You can then accept credit card payments. And there’s none of the usual hassle of a processor doing an intrusive background check. Just fill out the form on www.SquareUp.com, and they’ll send it to you. Even babysitters are using this service.

For me, the most surprising part is the cost. They charge you 2.75% for each transaction, and that’s it. No monthly charges or anything else. That’s what any business would expect to pay. Compare that with some well-known, online credit card processors that will take up to 10% of your receipts.

If you play a lot of media files from different sources, or go to web sites off the beaten path that have video and sound that you want to play, you might get an error that you don’t have the necessary codec to play the file. What does that mean, and what do you do?

First: a codec is a program that encodes and decodes sound and video files. Hence the word COder DECoder. In the old days (when I used to configure video conferencing systems in the 1980s), codecs were expensive hardware devices. These days, they’re little programs that run on your computer behind the scenes, but Windows still considers them to be hardware. That’s why they’re listed in the Device Manager screen in System Properties.

Windows Media Player should download codecs automatically, when needed. If it doesn’t find what you need, you can search for codecs at Microsoft’s download center. Codecs are also available from other well-known publishers, like Adobe, Apple and others. Or if you know the FourCC number of the codec you need, you can Google it.

But downloading codec packs is a very bad idea. Codec packs are collections of many codecs bundled together, so — in theory — you don’t have to hunt for them individually. There are a lot of them around and most are free, but many codecs in these packs tend not to be properly tested, and this causes system instability that can be hard to diagnose and fix. You might get the short term benefit of being able to play a video, but the longer term headaches often aren’t worth it. Download codecs only from known, trusted sources. These should be digitally signed by the manufacturer.

Prices of hard drives continue to fall. For a workstation, I just purchased a 1 terabyte, internal drive for $70. And it has a 16 mb internal buffer, which is pretty high and not very common. Thank you, Tiger Direct.

For a laptop, I just bought a 500 gb, internal drive for $85. So what’s the big deal? The disc spins at 7200 RPM, instead of the 5400 RPM speed typical of most laptop drives. Thank you, Best Buy. The only downside is that the faster drive will use up battery life a little faster.

The lesson to all this is that if you need to re-install or upgrade your operating system, there’s little need anymore to go through the routine of backing everything up, re-formatting the drive, then restoring all the data. Just pull the old hard drive out and after installing the new drive, attach the old drive as a secondary device. Copy the data back at your leisure and put the old drive on a shelf, so you have an archive.