At its educational event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City this morning, Apple revealed its new textbook publishing and distribution system. It also updated iTunes U to better serve educators in creating online courses.
Courtesy of Apple
iBooks 2 is an update to the current iBooks reader app for the iPad. This new version is designed for use with interactive educational textbooks that will be produced using various publishing tools, including Apple's own iBook Author. Apple is partnering with McGraw-Hill, Pearson, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, three of the leading textbook publishers in the U.S.
Apple says no textbook will cost more than $14.99. Students can keep their textbooks forever, and even re-download them from Apple's cloud servers at any time. Authors can update their textbooks at any time as well.
Some of the new interactive textbook titles are already available via the new iBooks 2 app.
iBook Author is a new free application from Apple that will allow anyone to create interactive textbooks, upload the textbooks for sale in the iBooks 2 store, or upload them for free distribution through iTunes U. iBook Author comes with a handful of templates for various textbook types, and widgets for controlling interactive content.
iTunes U, which has had lecture series available for a long time, has been updated to support taking complete courses on the iPad. Yale, Duke, MIT, and Stanford already have coursework available via iTunes U. iTunes U now includes course overviews and outlines of course plans, and offers users the ability to track assignments, collect and manage course notes, read textbooks, view videos, listen to audio, and much more.
This is Apple's first really big push into the textbook publishing world, and with three of the big textbook players already on board, Apple may redefine the way textbooks are created, sold, and used. Only time will tell.
Don’t get too excited about all the Apple iBooks self publishing news. As soon as you publish you create and publish your book through Apple’s “iBooks Author” you give up your rights to publish that book through any of the wide variety of popular eBook publishers. I don’t work for this company but my personal suggestion would be to use Smashwords.com. If anyone has tried going through the process of getting an ebook published and up for sale on more then one site then you know that each site has a different system and different requirements that make the entire process long and frustrating for each of them. Smashwords.com helps you easily get your ebook properly formatted and submitted to a ton of the major ebook retailers including: Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and the Diesel eBook Store to name a few. They also sell your ebooks on their own online store and make your ebook available for sale in just about every format that exists and to top it off they do all of that for free!