Lakeland Technology Department
Apple unveiled today iBooks 2, a "new textbook experience" for theiPad and the company's attempt to bury traditional schoolbooks.
"Clearly, no printed textbook can compete," Roger Rosner, an Apple vice president, said during a press event this morning at New York's Guggenheim Museum.
The company also announced iBooks Author, a free app for self-publishing e-books, and improvements to the iTunes U app that puts entire courses online and allows instructors to post syllabi and messages for students.
Before unveiling the plan, Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing, noted the sad state of current textbooks. They aren't portable, searchable, current, or interactive, he said.
"We want to reinvent the textbook," Schiller said. He noted that more than 20,000 educational apps are already available for the iPad and that more than 1.5 million iPads are already in use in education.
Rosner showed off some of the potential improvements with digital textbooks: text with embedded movies..."rich, engaging" layouts...portrait/landscape mode switches for more or fewer graphics....the ability to tap on words for definitions...searching for keywords throughout a text...review questions with immediate feedback...highlighting with your finger...pop-up spaces for note taking...instant study cards.
iBooks 2 will offer "super-fast, super-fluid navigation," Rosner said.
A new textbook category is appearing in the iBooks store, he noted, and the iBooks 2 app can be downloaded to the iPad today.
Meanwhile, iBooks Author will let anyone create interactive books. To assist, Apple has built templates for books, including math and science books.
A lot of people already have great content written, Schiller said, and iBooks Author will enable them to quickly bring together word files, images, and videos. The app includes auto-wrap of images around text. And people who can write code in JavaScript and HTML can create interactive widgets.
If you've ever create an e-book before, Schiller said, you know this is a "total miracle" in terms of time savings.
Meanwhile, Schiller said, iBooks 2 will offer books for every subject, every grade level, and every student.
New high school textbooks will cost $14.99 or less.
Apple has worked with a number of publishers on this project, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. The digital versions of two Pearson textbooks and five McGraw-Hill textbooks--already in use by millions of high school students--are in iBooks 2 as of today. The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation has book called "Life on Earth," available today for free.
With iTunes U, students can stream lectures, read texts, watch videos online, and then tap to mark the assignment as completed. As of now, iTunes U is used at about 1,000 universities. Starting today, elementary schools through high schools can use it too. iTunes U is free and available in 123 countries, Apple said.
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