TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Inkling, a digital textbook platform for the iPad, is getting a few new features:

Inkling’s technology delivers interactive textbooks that include the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. The startup adds another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content. Inkling’s sync technology lets students collaborate in real time by sharing their notes and highlights with one another. And students can see comments from their friends and professors right alongside their own notes.

The newest version of the platform has made established ‘Study Groups’ within textbooks, where students can ask questions and add comments anywhere in the book with classmates, professors and others who are reading the same book using Inkling. Inkling has also added ‘expert’ notes to the book, allowing students to get access to their notes and comments.

For two of my courses this semester, I’m using only digital textbooks—and one of them is an Inkling book. I’m really excited to use it, because there’s so much potential on the iPad to make textbooks much better learning tools than they are in print. Inkling is taking advantage of some of them, and I can’t wait to try it out.

It’s a bit risky, of course; it’s still cheaper to rent textbooks than it is to purchase their digital versions, and there’s a very real chance that I won’t be able to access the textbook in the future because of format obsolescence or because Inkling doesn’t survive. Nonetheless, though, this is absolutely the future.