Apple Unveils Software To Reinvent the Textbook

redletterdave writes "At the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Apple announced on Thursday it would update its iBooks platform to include textbook capabilities and also added a new platform called iBooks Author, which lets anyone easily create and publish their own e-books. Apple's senior VP of marketing, Phil Schiller, introduced iBooks 2, which has a new textbook experience for the iPad. The books themselves display larger images, and searching content is made significantly easier: all users need to do is tap on a word and they are taken straight to an appropriate glossary or index section in the back of the book. Navigating pages and searching is also easy and fluid, and at the end of each chapter is a full review with questions and pictures. If you want the answers to the questions, all you need to do is tap the question to get instant feedback. Apple also launched the iBooks Author app, which lets anyone easily create any kind of textbook and publish it to the iBookstore, and the new iTunes U platform, which helps teachers and students communicate better, and even send each other materials and notes created with iBooks Author. All of the apps are free, and available for any and all students, from K-12 to major universities."

Comments

Re:Hype

[jmorris42]

Yup, the summary was 100% content free marketing buzz. And the Faithful ate it up and shouted "Yes! Screw me harder."

Touching a word in an ebook and having it look it up. Amazing! Totally insane that nobody else did that before the geniuses at Apple invented that. Oh, every other ebook platform has done that since forever? Oh well.

Apple books display larger images! Eh? Come again? Don't they ALL allow resizing on ePub content? OF course Apple has their own formats and I guess that just gained image resizing so it was just 'invented.' Somebody dumb enough to actually buy iProducts can perhaps put me some knowledge on here.

"and at the end of each chapter is a full review with questions and pictures" Wow, the innovation here is simply amazing. No textbook, printed or electronic EVER did that before.

"If you want the answers to the questions, all you need to do is tap the question to get instant feedback." Wow, no need to actually LEARN anything, Apple does everything for you. Just feed em some sweet sweet taxpayer dollars by the dumptruck load and every one of your students can be above average.

"Apple also launched the iBooks Author app, which lets anyone easily create any kind of textbook and publish it to the iBookstore, and the new iTunes U platform, which helps teachers and students communicate better, and even send each other materials and notes created with iBooks Author"

Wow, more innovation. If you buy into their closed hardware and software ecosystem they actually allow you to create and sell content in it... for their usual percentage. Who has ever thought if doing that you might ask? Truly this alone justifies the valuation of AAPL stock as being greater than all others.. including big oil, Boeing, etc.