There was a lot of digital paper dedicated to the potential disruptive effects of the iPad on the textbook industry, but it took until today to fulfil that idea.
Today, in a New York press conference held at the Guggenheim, Apple announced iBooks 2, an interactive textbook experience for the iPad. Partnering with publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (which together make up 90% of the textbook industry) scholars will be able to download their course materials from the iBookstore for $14.99 or less (at least for the first crop of books). Features like embedded video, interactive pages and multitouch support are all present, and with the freely-available iBooks Author for Mac, authors can create textbooks and publish them directly to the store.
The potential for change is huge here, but it will be up to the textbook companies to keep prices low enough, and content compelling enough, to justify high schools and universities moving away from the established model. And, remember, not everyone has an iPad. But with rich content, HTML support, 3D models and the ability to annotate (no more writing in the margins!) iBooks 2 is likely going to be just as disruptive as Apple hopes it will.
Note that, at least for now, the textbooks in iBooks 2.0 will only be available for those living in the United States. That should change once licensing and publishing deals have been reached with the respective publishers in Canada.
Download the iBooks 2.0 update from iTunes now.
Source: The Verge
MobileSyrup may earn a commission from purchases made via our links, which helps fund the journalism we provide free on our website. These links do not influence our editorial content. Support us here.
