Reinventing The Textbook: Apple Takes On Education with Interactive Textbooks for iPad

Apple made their biggest push into education in recent years this morning during a press event at the Guggenheim museum in New York City. The focus of the event was two main initiatives including: Reinventing textbooks with the iBooks 2.0 app, and reinventing the way we create textbooks with the “iBooks Author” e-book creation tool.

It’s clear that Apple is betting that the success of its App Store model translates over to education. After downloading the updated iBooks app, users will now have access to a textbooks category selling content rich, interactive textbooks from major publishers such as Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All those publishers are making a selection of their most popular high school textbooks available initially, some of which sell for up to $75 normally, through the iBookstore for just $14.99 or less.

Perhaps the most important aspect of Apple’s announcements today is a new creation tool known as iBooks Author that will allow publishers, authors, and developers to create the type of interactive textbooks the company showed off in their presentation. You can get quite a good look at the company’s mission in the promotional video Apple put together below:

In addition to the two major textbook related announcements, Apple is also launching a new iTunes U iOS app for iPhone and iPad. iTunes U has for a long time been a portal to educational material like free courses consisting of videos, e-books, and podcasts on iTunes.

Now you can access “The world’s largest catalog of free education content” with over 500,000 free lectures right from your iOS device. You can learn more in Apple’s full press release here.

If Apple’s new education and textbook projects can capitalize on at least a fraction of the success of iPad, the App Store model, and their partnerships with content providers and developers, the textbook industry could look a lot different in the near the future.

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