Having reinvented a variety of other markets, Apple is now turning its attention to textbooks. On Thursday, the technology giant announced iBooks 2, through which it hopes to reinvent textbooks on the iPad.
At the press event held in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing Phil Schiller said that “education is deep in our DNA, and it has been since the very beginning.” With digital textbooks on the iPad, Schiller said, users can avoid the weight, wear and tear, and non-searchability that hinder learning with textbooks.
‘Beautiful Books’
iBooks 2 is now available as a free download, and Schiller said high school textbooks will be available through the company’s iBookstore at $ 14.99 each or less. The authoring tool, iBooks Author, is available for free, and includes Apple-provided templates.
iBooks 2 makes extensive use of interactive multimedia, with support for gestural navigation, interactive 3D objects, videos, audio, interactive quizzes, note-taking, and other modes. “These are beautiful books,” Schiller told the news media. He added that “kids are really going to love to learn with textbooks in iBook.” The company said it has been developing digital textbooks with McGraw-Hill, Pearson PLC, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which together account for the vast majority of textbooks in the U.S.
Not including the impact from iBooks 2, 6 percent of textbooks are expected to be available in digital form in 2012, twice the percentage available last year. One distributor, MBS Direct Digital, has estimated that half of all textbooks will be digital by the end of this decade. There are about 1.5 million iPads in educational institutions, and the device has about 70 percent of the tablet market.
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