Apple unveils interactive iPad textbooks

Apple Inc unveiled a new digital textbook service called iBooks 2 on Thursday, aiming to revitalize the U.S. education market and quicken the adoption of its market-leading iPad. During the event, Apple also introduced tools to craft digital textbooks and demonstrated how authors and even teachers can create books for students.

Apple's new iBooks 2 app is demonstrated for the media on an iPad at an event in the Guggenheim Museum. iBooks 2 is a new free app featuring iPad interactive textbooks. The company also announced iBook Author, an application to create digital textbooks, and iTunes U, an educational app for students and teachers.

Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, speaks about Apple's plan to "reinvent" textbooks. Apple announced iBooks 2, a new free app featuring iPad interactive textbooks. Start with the bookshelf. With a tap, it flips around to reveal the iBookstore, where you’ll find over 700,000 books and counting — many of them free. View what’s featured on the iBookstore and the New York Times best-seller lists, or browse by title, author, or genre. Find a book you like and tap to see more details, peruse reviews, even read a free sample. With iCloud, you can have the new books you buy on your iPad automatically download to your iPhone and iPod touch, too.* So they appear on your bookshelf, everywhere you want them.

Reading on iPad is just like reading a book. But once you tap to turn the first page, you’ll see it’s nothing like a book. Read one page at a time, or turn iPad on its side and view two pages at once. Tap to read everything full screen, with no distractions, or read in white-on-black nighttime mode. Even alter the look of most books by changing their text size and font. 

Readers can manipulate 3D objects with a touch — so instead of seeing a cross section of a brain, they can see all sections. iBooks Author gives book creators the option to adjust the background, allow readers to rotate the object freely, or constrain its movement to horizontal or vertical rotation.

Apple, which has made a habit of revolutionizing the way we interact with technology, is now turning its digital sights on the venerable analog textbook. Every costly new edition of a textbook means the old one is outdated, so Apple is betting that in the swiftly-changing information age, both the market and the halls of academia are ready for virtual textbooks – and that their wildly popular iPad tablet computer is the perfect platform to host them.

Virtual textbooks are portable and easily updated – and they can deliver videos, animations, definitions, flashcards, quizzes and interactive content. A pilot program at Amelia Earhart Middle School in Riverside found that students who used digital algebra textbooks on Apple’s iPad in the 2010-2011 school year scored 20 percent higher than their fellow students using traditional textbooks in the California Standards testing in the spring of 2011. But some experts are wary. Apple’s traditional 70/30 revenue split with content providers has ruffled feathers in the music business and Apple’s policies dictate that what is created with Apple software can be sold only through Apple’s iBookstore. Apple says that they can provide digital textbooks for $14.99 or less, but worries persist that cash-strapped schools won’t be able to provide a $499.00 iPad to every student, thereby widening the “digital divide” between school districts in wealthy and poor areas.