After Songs and Videos, Crib Notes Become the Latest Offering for iPods

By BROCK READ

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After songs and videos, crib notes become the latest offering for iPods

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With iPods slowly working their way into college classrooms, it was only a matter of time before someone put the devices to use as a way of cutting corners on course work.

Now a pair of companies has stepped up, offering a line of iPod-ready crib notes to such literary classics as The Great Gatsby and The Scarlet Letter. The notes are taken from study guides published by SparkNotes -- a company that has marketed itself as a hipper version of CliffsNotes, the giant of the field -- and are sold by iPREPpress, a business that retails reference material that can be viewed on the digital music players.

Right now about a dozen titles are available at $4.95 apiece. But the companies plan to publish digital guides for about 50 English-department cornerstones, according to Kurt Goszyk, the founder of iPREPpress.

The guides basically turn the iPod into a text-based browser: Students can read biographical sketches of characters, review themes and motifs, and test themselves with study questions and answers -- all by using the iPod's click wheel to navigate a series of hyperlinks.

But students can also listen to overviews of the books' plots and protagonists while they work out at the gym or walk from class to class. The study guides each include about six or seven minutes of audio material for students on the go, said Mr. Goszyk. "But in areas where you really have to concentrate" -- like SparkNotes' more detailed summaries of quotations and symbolism -- "we kept it as only text," he said.

So the digital study guides aren't meant to get students out of reading altogether, according to Mr. Goszyk. The crib notes should be a hit, he argued, because many students are already joined at the hip with their digital music players. "If there are two things you're going to carry on your body at all times, it's your cell phone and your iPod," he said.

The study guides appear to be the first such resources available on iPods. CliffsNotes does not list any iPod-ready material on its Web site. Representatives with Wiley, the publisher that owns CliffsNotes, did not return calls for comment.

The guides released by SparkNotes and iPREPpress are compatible with most iPods -- including the new video-playing model and the iPod Nano, which has a screen about the size of a postage stamp. That could be bad news for professors, who may worry that such small devices could easily become digital cheat sheets in the hands of unscrupulous students.

Mr. Goszyk conceded that iPods loaded with study guides could be smuggled into classrooms. "I think anytime you've got something -- whether it's technology or just a slip of paper -- that you could sneak into the classroom, those people who are going to want to cheat are going to cheat," he said.

Professors whose reading lists include works like Pride and Prejudice or The Odyssey may have to police their classrooms carefully on exam day, Mr. Goszyk said.

But, he argued, students will find other reasons to consider the merits of the iPod study guides -- like the novelty of reading notes on the same devices that play their favorite music. "You can listen to your favorite rap song in the background as you're reading about The Great Gatsby," he says. "Whatever sense that makes, I don't know."

• CliffsNotes Gets On-Line Competition With an Interactive Twist (9/17/1999)