Inkling Review

Amid news that a spate of universities have begun offering iPads to incoming freshmen, savvy App Store developers have stepped up in an attempt to make the device the ultimate classroom tool for today's students. To capitalize on the lack of viable e-textbook options, Standard Nine, Inc. has introduced Inkling. Unfortunately, despite being a user-friendly app with a slick interface and loads of potential, a lack of available texts and a few minor technical problems suggest that undergrads may yet be stuck with musty, physical tomes for semesters to come.

Luckily, Inkling gets a number of things right. To begin with, the in-app store is as pleasing to the eye and easy to navigate as Apple's own iBookstore. Textbooks are searchable and arranged by discipline. When you find a book you want, you have the option of buying the entire book or selecting individual chapters for purchase--ideal for courses in which the professor may only refer to selections from a given text. As an added bonus, complete Inkling e-texts are priced at a substantial discount when compared to their print counterparts. For example, a certain marketing textbook sells for $79.99 on Inkling and $108 on Amazon.

Once inside a purchased book, the user interface is pitch-perfect and feature-rich. Taking a cue from Apple and Amazon, Inkling follows the try-before-you-buy model and offers a free downloadable chapter for each of its available books. The app also comes with a free version of Strunk and White's Elements of Style. I explored this text, as well as a chapter from Kerin, Hartley, and Rudelius's Marketing.

Browsing and navigating a text's contents is a dream. On selecting Marketing from my library, the app presents me with a horizontal, scrollable layout of all the book's chapters (unpurchased chapters are grayed-out), as well as a listing of subsections for each chapter. I select the "Setting Strategic Directions" heading from Chapter Two and am instantly taken to the relevant section in the book. When viewed in landscape, a column on the left-hand side of the screen lists chapter subsections, and the right 75% of the screen is taken up by the text itself. In portrait mode, the text takes up almost the entire screen, with only a thin sliver reserved for navigation buttons and a "spine" that represents my position in the chapter graphically.

In terms of the actual reading experience, iBooks users will find all the options to which they have become accustomed. You can resize text, search for words or phrases, highlight, and create notes. Each task icon is intuitively placed and easy to use. Page navigation is a simple matter of standard scrolling or using a single tap at the top or bottom of a page as a Page-up/Page-down function.

Inkling sets itself apart, however, by offering a couple of features that are tailor-made for academia and also not available in any other current e-reader. The first is the glossary function. With two taps, I was able to access the text's embedded glossary of terms, so I could figure out what a "strategic business unit" was, all without having to flip to the end of a book or search through previous chapters for the answer. The second innovative function is a social networking feature that allows you to share highlights and notes with anyone from your in-app contact list.

If these features weren't enough, Inkling also offers crisp, clear images and captions that can be blown-up with a single tap; resizable, sometimes interactive sidebars; and the ability to view pop-out bibliographic citations and footnotes.

The app is not without its problems, however. Occasional crashes interrupt the reading experience and may erase highlights and notes. Additionally, the download process sometimes stutters, and the time the app takes to actually install purchased content is substantial.

Ultimately, though, the app's true Achilles heel is its available content--or lack thereof. A bookstore is only as good as the stock it contains, and, at least right now, Inkling's shelves are almost bare. As of this writing, the in-app store contained a paltry seven texts, but with a big-name press like McGraw-Hill already on board, I am hopeful that other major publishers will follow suit.

To be sure, an expanded catalog, coupled with Inkling's thoughtful design and impressive bevy of features, could have the potential to revolutionize academic content delivery and bring higher education into the digital age. Until that day comes, though, undergrads will have to content themselves with mere dreams of a paperless classroom.