Apple’s Aim at Education With iBooks 2 and Textbook Publishing Tools, Is On Point: ScannableMedia

Not happy to have shaken up only half a dozen indus­tries, Apple offi­cially unveiled what the com­pany hopes is the next phase in text­books. iBooks 2 is now avail­able in the iTunes App Store.

The update pro­vides access to Apple’s new breed of inter­ac­tive text­books, which are aimed at high school stu­dents and will cost $14.99 each. To help pop­u­late the store, the com­pany has also launched a suite of dig­i­tal pub­lish­ing tools for authors. Phil Schiller, Apple’s VP of World­wide Mar­ket­ing, revealed the company’s plans this morning.

Apple’s new dig­i­tal text­books are avail­able through the iBook­store and fea­ture much more rich and inter­ac­tive com­po­nents than past, consumer-focused e-books. In a demo at a press event in New York City, the com­pany demoed a sci­ence text­book com­plete with video, rich graph­ics, mul­ti­touch sup­port and thumbnail-based navigation.

Spon­sor

Text­books sold through iBooks 2 allow for a far more inter­ac­tive learn­ing expe­ri­ence than their paper coun­ter­parts. Glos­sary terms can be looked up instantly, the index of each book con­tains links to the appro­pri­ate sec­tions and each chap­ter closes out with an inter­ac­tive Q&A for students.

Books can come with built-in flash cards for mem­o­riza­tion as well as any addi­tional mul­ti­me­dia or Web-based resources that could aide in the learn­ing process.

To bring this new ini­tia­tive to mar­ket, Apple part­nered with text­book pub­lish­ers Pear­son, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mif­flin Har­court. Ini­tially, the text­books will largely be geared toward high school stu­dents, but it sounds like there are plans to expand to other lev­els of edu­ca­tion in time.

Ful­fill­ing Steve Jobs’ Vision

In his offi­cial biog­ra­phy of Apple’s late cofounder, Wal­ter Isaac­son revealed that in addi­tion to tele­vi­sion and pho­tog­ra­phy, one indus­try Steve Jobs was hop­ing to rev­o­lu­tion­ize next was text­books, which he saw as being “ripe for dig­i­tal destruction.”

The demon­stra­tion very much echoed Jobs’ vision for text­books, which he saw as cum­ber­some, heavy and slow to update. By con­trast, the iPad is portable, inter­ac­tive and of course quite easy to update with new information.

To that end, Apple is also rolling out a new appli­ca­tion for the Mac that enables authors to eas­ily build inter­ac­tive text­books using a drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG inter­face. iBooks Author for OS X sup­ports every­thing from sim­ple text to inter­ac­tive graph­ics and allows authors to weave the Web into their pub­li­ca­tions using JavaScript and HTML5 add-ons.

Apple also unveiled a new iTunes U app, which gives teach­ers more dig­i­tal tools to stay orga­nized and com­mu­ni­cate with their students.

This is not an all together shock­ing direc­tion for Apple to move into, con­sid­er­ing its some­what recent foray into e-books with iBooks and how the iPad is already being used for edu­ca­tional purposes.

That the tablet form fac­tor makes for a poten­tially excel­lent edu­ca­tional tool is not at all a new con­cept, and it’s one that Apple has already been using to help sell the iPad pretty much since day one.

Dis­cuss

Posted from ReadWriteWeb

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