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As expected, Apple's education event at the Guggenheim Museum brought forth new ways for students to read their classic texts in interactive, digital form. As usual, Apple also brought its own magic design skills to shake up the market with a new iBooks 2 and iBooks Author to help create a world of educational content.
Down With the Kids
As Apple's event kicked off there was lots of talk of children and students being given iPads as digital bookstores and learning tools. That's a lovely idea, but you can see the lines of bullies and muggers being almost as long as the line for people trying to get their free/subsidized iPad.
Apple made no hardware announcements at the event, but with iPad 3 not far off, getting iPads cheaply into schools is likely to be high on the company's to-do list. Anyway, Apple's Phil Schiller, senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, took the stage and talked about the engagement that an iPad can bring (there are some 1.5 million in schools right now) as well as the tens of thousands of educational apps already available.
Schiller said Apple wants to reinvent the textbook, which (according to him) suffer from lack of portability (how feeble is this guy?), search (ever heard of an index?) and interactivity (he's clearly never scribbled on the blank pages or done flick animations in the corners of pages).
Meet iBooks 2
To solve these problems, Apple launched iBooks 2, available from today for the iPad at no cost which offers access to a long-form version of the typical app with all kinds of interactivity possible through movie clips, graphics, puzzles, equations, exploding images, rotatable visuals and whatever content the publisher has. There's an extended marketing heavy video over at Apple's site.
iPads are the new textbooks according to Apple
In an educational format it looks really good, like the best how-to guides ever, as long as the content is of a suitable quality which requires a decent budget and design skills. Additional features include an in-line glossary, end-of-chapter check points and Apple's usual slick navigation. Students can also highlight important sections, take notes from their book and turn them into flash cards for talks or presentations.
Publishing the Future
The second part of Apple's presentation was about iBooks Author, another free App for Mac PCs, a content creation system to help make your own iBooks. Taking a template based approach, users can make any kind of book they like from ABC-type kid's books to cooking up to astrophysics.
Those with existing text can drag the files in and watch it automatically flow into place. Movies, pictures, slideshows (like whole Keynote files if you like) and interactive elements can be dragged around and dropped on the page with ease, autoflowing the text, and it all happens live in no time at all. Interactive widgets can be added in HTML5 or JavaScript and you can create a glossary, just by adding particular words to the list as you read through.
UPDATE: A backlash is already beginning about the license agreement that means if you create a book and sell it on the store, you can't sell it elsewhere. That might mean you can't sell the book in another store in that specific format, or Apple could really have blundered. It states:
"If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple (e.g., through the iBookstore) and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple."
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