By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla
Apple today announced iBooks 2 for the iPad, iTunes U for educators and the iBooks Author bookdesign Mac App at an event held in New York's iconic Guggenheim Museum. Focusing on the education market, an area that has long been important to Apple's core, the new system aims to simplify the authorship of textbooks as well as how information is displayed and accessed through the iPad's multi-touch interface.
Demoing science books on the iPad, Apple showed how easy it is to animate diagrams, show short videos and allow multiple layers of virtual "hands-on" interaction with various topics.
At the press event, a demo was given with the new textbooks having easy access to references such as the Table of Contents, Indexes and Glossaries. The new iBooks 2 can also integrate note-taking.
A new Textbooks section has been added to the iTunes store for iOS. iBooks 2 is available for free download starting today. Textbook publishers who want to get in on creating iBooks for the iPad or porting their 40-year old texts into a more current form can use iBooks Author which is a Mac only application that helps with the layout, design and multimedia creation of content that can be exported into Apple's iBook format and sold through their online store.
Textbook publishing remains one of the traditional mediums that is stuck in the dark ages. Each year students need to buy dozens of expensive hardbound books which are constantly revised to fight attrition (or the second hand sale of books at discounted prices) on of while 80 per cent of the content remains the same in most cases.
"We've been working with Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt," said Apple's VP of Marketing Phil Schiller noting that these are the 'Big three' companies in educational textbooks pushing out 90% of the titles today.
A tablet-focused authoring solution like what Apple showed off offers a number of groundbreaking solutions.
- Books can be updated on the fly and quickly through Internet app updates
- Students can carry throusands of books in one iPad
- The tests, exercises and various learning tools that were on CD ROM or online can now all be integrated within the book
- Students can give authors real-time feedback or post questions
- Photocopying and illegal sharing of books is now impossible since apps can't be shared between users.
Apple hopes that iBooks 2 will entrench them in the educational market and will strengthen their position against competitors like Amazon who recently challenged the iPad with its Fire eReader/Tablet device which it sells for $199 but only in the US.
Canadian specific info:
- iBooks Author application for OS X Lion is now available in CA from the Mac App Store
- Only the DK titles (4) and the E.O. Wilson title are available in Canada at this time. Of the 5 new books available today in CA, all were created with iBooks Author.
- All DK books are here:
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/collection/dk-readers/id28629?fcId=496310524&mt=11
The FREE and totally awesome E.O. Wilson title is here:
http://itunes.apple.com/ca/book/e.o.-wilsons-life-on-earth/id494050258?mt=11
Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla