Apple has just vowed to reinvent textbooks, and of course the perfect delivery vehicle is the iPad. The big unveiling at today’s education and eBook related event in New York City was iBooks 2 for iOS. The latest version of the app now gives access to interactive textbooks. iBooks textbooks make things more exciting than you typical paperback with interactive 3D models, video and audio. You now also have the ability to pinch for the table of contents, and of course you still have all the typical multitouch navigation gestures.
Besides saving you from lugging big blocks of wood, electronic iBooks textbooks allow you to quickly search for content, highlight text, take notes and even turn them to virtual study cards. Textbooks are rather competitively priced at $14.99 or less, and publishers on-board for the launch include McGraw Hill, Pearson, DK Publishing and Mifflin Harcourt.
You can already download iBooks 2 from the App Store, but be aware that, although iBooks 2 is compatible with both the iPhone and iPad, you can only download textbooks on the latter for now. You must also be running iOS 5+. Apple also announced a free Mac OS X app, iBooks Author, which allows anyone to create textbooks, or any other iBooks and load it on your iPad or publish it on the iBookstore.
Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world,
said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love
.
Be aware that textbooks, even in electronic format, can weigh a lot. The first eight iBooks textbooks start from around 800MB up to a whole 2.8GB; a few of these would quickly eat-up the space on your 16GB iPad. Of course this is the cost of rich graphics and interactive content.
Here are the sizes of the currently available textbooks:
– Pearson’s Environmental Science: 793MB
– National’s Chemistry: 959MB
– E.O. Wilson’s Life On Earth: 965MB
– McGraw Hill’s Algebra 1: 1.09GB
– McGraw Hill’s Geometry: 1.22GB
– McGraw Hill’s Physics: 1.25GB
– McGraw Hill’s Biology: 1.49GB
– Pearson’s Biology: 2.77GB
Press release:
Apple Reinvents Textbooks with iBooks 2 for iPad
New iBooks Author Lets Anyone Create Stunning iBooks TextbooksNEW YORK—January 19, 2012—Apple today announced iBooks 2 for iPad, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don’t weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore℠ with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac can create stunning iBooks textbooks.
“Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love.”
The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store. With support for great new features including gorgeous, fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger. With its fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards, the new iBooks 2 app lets students study and learn in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.
iBooks Author is also available today as a free download from the Mac App Store and lets anyone with a Mac create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple’s iBookstore. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations and 3D objects.
Apple today also announced an all-new iTunes U app giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to teach and take entire courses. With the new iTunes U app, students using iPads have access to the world’s largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore that can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies.* The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store.
