In February, we did a feature review on the first interactive medical textbook for the iPad, Ganong’s Review of Medical Physiology. The Physiology textbook was brought to life via the Inkling Platform, an app you can download on the iPad. The Inkling Platform is no ordinary textbook app — unlike other similar e-book apps, the developers do not copy and paste the content at verbatim into digital form.
Rather, textbooks are brought to life by interactive graphs and figures, customized quizzes, beautiful multimedia, social media integration, and an innovative user interface. Inkling also allows you to purchase individual chapters of various textbooks for $1.99 — significant since many medical students don’t read full texts, only chapters they truly need.
Our full review of the Ganong text highlighted many of these features, and we would be remiss not to mention how deeply enamored we were by Inkling’s version of Ganong’s textbook — we felt their version was the blueprint of how a mobile medical textbook should be.
We’re excited to discover textbook publishers of medical content, McGraw Hill and Pearson, are taking notice as well. They recently invested heavily into the company, and are going to make many of their medical education and reference textbooks available for Inkling’s iPad platform.
In a statement by McGraw Hill on their investment in the Inkling company and their platform:
“Creating an interactive, higher-value e-book experience for students is central to our strategy at McGraw-Hill,” said executive Vineet Madan, vice president of McGraw-Hill Learning Ecosystems, in a statement. “We are excited to deepen our relationship with Inkling as we seek to broaden the educational tools and content available on the iPad and other mobile devices.”
This could truly be a new era in mobile medical textbooks — and it’s refreshing to see heavyweight medical publishers finally taking note.
Source: Xconomy
iTunes Link to Inkling iPad textbook app
