Apple is Getting into the Textbooks/Education Business

by Emmanuel Quartey

Apple’s Thursday education announcement has left educators and publishers wondering what the company’s new products mean for the future of learning.

The three major components of the announcement are as follows:

iBooks 2

This update to iBooks introduces textbooks with multimedia content, including 3D animation, video and sound clips and the ability to automatically crate flashcards from highlighted content.
Apple has partnered with Pearson, McGraw Hill and Houghton Mifflin. These 3 publishers control 90% of all textbooks sold in the US.
$15 price cap per textbook
Large file sizes (up to 2.77 GB per textbook.
Currently 8 textbooks available in the iBookstore. More in the works.
Going after companies like Kno and Inking

iBooks Author

Free OS X program for creating iBooks
Anyone, including educators, can create their own media-rich textbooks or other publication
Authors can publish to the iBookstore (following review process)
standard 70/30 split between writer and Apple

iTunes U

Standalone app for the popular iTunes category. Over 500,000 free lectures, videos and books
Allows educators to be able to design and distribute courses with multimedia content using iTunes Course Manager
iTunes U features content from major academic institutions, including Yale, Stanford and Oxford
Tightly integrated with iBooks

FURTHER READING

NEXT UP

trying out and reviewing one of these iBooks textbooks
trying out and reviewing iTunes U (looking into the experience of using iTunes U, and how easy it is to create a course)
curious to see how easy it is to create a publish my own iBook

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