Apple enters textbooks with Ibooks 2

TOY MAKER FOR THE WELL HEELED Apple revealed that it is after a slice of the multi-billion pound textbook industry at an event today.

Apple's major announcement with educators and publishers at the Guggenheim Museum in New York introduced partnerships that will bring digital textbooks to students - a $10 billion industry, according to Engadget's live blog of the event.

SVP of worldwide marketing at Apple Phil Schiller said, "We try to bring the same energy and passion we've put into every product we make into our education business as well."

Teachers are excited too, Schiller said, with 1.5 million Ipads in use in educational programs. "We want to help it to accelerate, and make it even easier to integrate the Ipad into the curriculum."

Apple said it is "reinventing the textbook" with Ibooks 2, a free app for the Ipad. The app has a section called "My Notes" that pulls everything together and, with a tap, users can make study cards. The high school textbooks themselves cost $14.99 or less.

Publishers Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are responsible for 90 per cent of the textbooks sold. Pearson has Algebra 1, Biology, Environmental Science and Geometry, books used by more than four million high school students.

Meanwhile, the also free app Ibooks Author is an OS X application for making these texts. Schiller said, "Authors are going to love to use Ibooks to create not only textbooks, but any kind of book."

Although you can write the book within the app, Apple knows that many people use Word. Users can drag in a Word file from Finder, drop it on the chapter, and it automatically creates sections and headers and lays out the pages automatically.

Meanwhile Itunes U is a tool for universities and colleges to deliver content around the world to anyone using an Iphone, Ipod touch or an Ipad. The dedicated app is, of course, free - though the content isn't. µ