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

I was at the announcement

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a textbook example of a product launch.

Re:I was at the announcement

[cayenne8]

While this all sounds good...I dunno if it would have helped me back in school, or even now (although I would try it).

I found back in HS and college...that with dead tree books...I often would do like I did on my notes in a separate note book....I'd scribble notes, and make doodles in the margins.

I found that by doing this...when taking tests, I could close my eyes, and mentally turn the pages of my notes and even my books and 'see' the pages in my head and find the answers.

Even today...while search and all is great with digital media, I find that to actually quickly remember and be able to recall importing things I'm reading...the act of my physically writing down quotes and notes, seems to chisel it in my brain for quick recall later. Just reading and searching on a screen doesn't seem to do it for me as well.

Maybe it is just me tho....

Re:I was at the announcement

[LandDolphin]

You are not alone. People learn and recall information in different ways. That's why there isn't a single solution. A teacher using this technology needs to also require note taking and assignments outside of the iPad-Textbook system to reach everyone.

Re:I was at the announcement

[ColdWetDog]

You actually read your textbooks? And you admit that?

I'll bet you even stoop so low as to read instruction manuals.

Re:I was at the announcement

[jc42]

While this all sounds good...I dunno if it would have helped me back in school, or even now (although I would try it). I found back in HS and college...that with dead tree books...I often would do like I did on my notes in a separate note book....I'd scribble notes, and make doodles in the margins.

This is a major problem in other areas beside schools. For example, I've seen a few attempts to provide musicians in bands and orchestras with computerized displays on their stands. This also sounds good at first, and it does give them very quick access to all the music in the system's library. But in the first rehearsal with the electronic gadgets, the musicians quickly discover that they have no practical way to scribble notes on the music. There is no second rehearsal with the electronics; the musicians simply state that they've gone back to paper and won't discuss the topic any more.

Similarly, I've had a "smart phone" since the late 1990s (not unusual for a software developer), and I've tried out all their calendar apps. I continue to buy a new paper pocket calendar every year. Using the phones' input methods are just too clumsy, and they never allow a lot of the things that I scribble on the paper. Of course, this is partly because in last year's pocket calendar, I find entries written in Cyrillic, Hebrew and Chinese characters. You'd think the calendar makers would like to sell to Serbian, Israeli, and Chinese customers, so that shouldn't be a problem, right? Try finding a smart-phone in the US with a calendar app that accepts non-English characters. Even people who speak Spanish or French complain about this.

Paper still has one strong advantage: You can scribble anything you like on it, and it holds the image until you (laboriously ;-) erase it. The tablet makers will have to match this capability if they're serious about replacing paper in a lot of environments.

Actually, I've seen, and occasionally used, some prototype software that let users scribble random junk on a "document". Such things existed back in the 1990s. But they don't seem to be available on commercial products. Or rather, they are available, but the apps only let you scribble on their own "documents", not on the documents used by other apps. If I can't scribble on, say, a PDF or PNG or SVG music score, but only on the scribble app's blank pages, it isn't of much use to me when I'm working on a piece of music.

This is a good concept, but...

[Reverand Dave]

I would really hate to see textbooks and other such informational sources be controlled through the iTunes market place. Maybe if the documents were in a DRM free format and available across different platforms but apple is not known for playing nice and sharing its toys to the benefit of anyone but its self.

Re:This is a good concept, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

As opposed to the current system which is...a complete scam? Where you have to pay $150 for a new edition of a book that differs from the previous version by 2%?

Re:Hype

[Microlith]

The caveat is that it doesn't matter who is first, or even who comes later. It's who gets the school districts and universities to mandate their platform as the source of all textbooks for all students. They get a guaranteed stream of tax dollars, and long term customers who will be familiar with their platform.

Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.

I'm the target for this, and I won't be using it.

[sdavid]

As a university professor and a mac user, I'm the obvious target for software like this, and in many respects it looks very attractive. However, I can't, in good conscience, force my students onto a particular platform, and that's what using this for course materials would do. I suppose it would be good if the university required all students to buy and iPad (and that's probably Apple's goal here), but without that it's useless. Proprietary formats like iBooks or the Kindle are out, and I'll continue to distribute materials to my students as pdf files, despite the limitations of that format.

Re:Hype

[bonch]

The ePub format is cross-platform HTML5. The .ibooks files that this tool exports are ePubs with a mime type of "application/x-ibooks+zip".

Re:Hype

[Tom]

Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.

The epub format (which iBooks uses, I'm not sure about iBooks2, we'll have to see) is HTML5.

And trust me, you don't want PDF for e-books. I have a couple PDF books alongside epub e-books on my iPad and gosh does PDF suck. It doesn't re-flow when I change from portrait to landscape, and it doesn't re-scale text, only zooms on a page level.

Re:I really don't get the point of this...

[Tom]

What the hell does an iPad do that cheaper full fledged computers haven't been able to do for ages?

It can sit on your desk alongside your books, papers, pencils and not take up all the space. You can carry it around, and it has a great form-factor for using it as a tool.

Typical geek error: You think this is about technological capabilities, specs - it isn't. It is about design, about integration into the workflow, about everything around the device as much as the device itself.

if I had an iPad to play with in class in school, I don't think much learning would have happened.

That absolutely is the #1 argument against an iPad or any other multi-purpose electronic gadget. Then again, if pupils want to play, they will. Back in my days, we played on paper. Worked, too.

And come on, it's Apple and we all know Apple can do no wrong.

They've done plenty of wrong. The reason you don't hear much about it is that unlike MS they don't keep their mistakes around for ages, spending billions on them until either they are so dead that they have to bury them because they start to smell (Zune), or the sheer amount of money and exclusivity-deals and other niceties that money can buy make it into a viable thing (xbox).

Apple buries its mistakes and moves on. Doesn't mean they don't make plenty of mistakes.

Kills the used books market

[HockeyPuck]

Publishers and authors of textbooks hate used books because they don't get any additional revenue. Which is why you'll see your standard freshman class books change every other year. How does Calc 101 change every year? The author changes one example replacing X with Y, and then can rev the book and get another $45 in revenue.

With an eBook with DRM, they'll make it so while the book might not cost $45, every student will be forced to buy it 'new' every year.

Re:A solution in search of a problem

[Tom]

I'm not really sold on the idea that we need interactive textbooks,

You didn't study anything complicated, then.

For all natural sciences, layered diagrams, 3D models that you can turn and watch from more than one perspective, etc. are godsent. Not because they are shiney and "multimedia", but because they convey more information better. Check out anatomy textbooks and tell me the diagrams wouldn't be 100% improved if they supported just layers.

Re:Open format?

[Tom]

iBooks 1 uses epub (I just published a book on it, so I know). I've not yet looked at what this new format is, but I've be surprised if it weren't epub as well.

They're a bit late to this game, Amazon is pretty entrenched with Kindles already in most people's hands,

Why does everyone with no clue whine on this article that it's about the iPad? Why do you think this is about the iPad? What makes you think that?

Apple has consistently won markets by thinking bigger than that. They always create nice integrated products, such as the iPod and iTunes - but they have always looked beyond the immediate. The iTunes music store is huge in itself, with or without iPod sales.

Sure, Apple will move more iPads if this gets big. But if the become a major publisher of textbooks, they gain something far beyond more iPad sales - they profit from the textbooks themselves, even if the students use a Kindle to read them.

Re:Open format?

[nahdude812]

It's about iPad because only iPad and iPhone can read the ibook format.

I downloaded iBooks Author and published a book to experiment with. I chose one of their templates, picking the one which seemed to have the fewest by way of zany formatting or artwork.

Although the file produced has a ".ibooks" extension, it looks like under the hood this is ePub at the heart, but with a pile of proprietary extensions on top. I renamed my published file to have an .epub extension, and loaded it up in my ebook reader. The text is readable, but the formatting is all gone. There are image assets floating around occupying space where text should be, but they were background images in the ibooks version, while here they're interfering with text flow. I'm guessing these images are responsible for the 1mb file size for a 3 page book too.

So the format may be ePub, and although the content isn't completely locked away, I might as well have published a .txt file, at least then it wouldn't be littered with garbage images. If this is an attempt to comply with existing book readers (in the spirit of the open format), it's at best a token attempt. This looks like it would be a great editor, if it was useful outside of the Apple iMpire.

Re:I'm the target for this, and I won't be using i

[sdavid]

That would alleviate some of my concerns, but from the engaged writeup: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks." (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apples-ibooks-author-hands-on/#continued) Not too open.

Enabling Digital Censorship

[sl4shd0rk]

This should save Texas a lot of time next time they want to rewrite school text books in the interest of religion.

Censorship - Now there's and App for that!

http://www.eschoolnews.com/2011/09/14/news-release-district-deploys-1300-ipad-alternatives-to-assure-ayp/

Re:Open format?

[nahdude812]

From the terms of use:

(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

So even though it's a (horribly broken) form of ePub, it doesn't matter, you're not allowed to sell it to anyone without an iDevice, only if Apple chooses to let you, and you get to pay Apple for this privilege privilege.

No. Thanks.