The days of lugging a 40-pound backpack to and from school are almost over, or so Apple would have us believe. At an invite-only event at the Guggenheim this morning, Apple introduced the newest version of its iBook ebook app, an ebook authoring tool, and introduced a line of math and science textbooks designed for the iPad. The textbooks are focused, for the time being, on elementary through high school students, and will supplement the existing 20,000 educational apps already made for the tablet.
"The textbook is not always the ideal learning tool," Apple's VP of Marketing Philip Schiller explained, "they're just not the ideal modern teaching tool." In addition to being physically cumbersome, traditional paper textbooks can't be frequently updated—without significant cost to both schools and students—while e-textbooks can be instantly updated through the interwebs.
Plus, e-textbooks can contain searchable and interactive databases, so if students need a definition, or expansion on a particular topic, they can access the book's glossary by highlighting the term in question. In the new e-world order textbook chapter's will end with a built-in quiz to test students absorption of the material and give them instant feedback. And when it comes time for real-life test prep, notes and glossary terms can be turned into study cards, eliminating the paper flash cards of days gone by (Apple is gunning for you, index card makers).
All the big guns in textbook publishing have jumped on the bandwagon, with Pearson's and McGraw-Hill books available now and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and, we assume, other publishers soon to follow. The new books are all priced under $15—good news for those of us who remember paying upwards of $100 for our Introduction to Geometry textbook. Still, you'll be gouged on the backend when you have to buy extra memory to store each iBook—they average about 2GBs each.
Meanwhile, aspiring authors looking to get into the textbook (or just book) biz can start today as Apple is also launching iBook Author, a free publishing application for burgeoning publishers, which gives folks the ability to upload imagery, animation and text and then publish the material for free.
All of these advancements are well and good but we're still left wondering how effective the implementation will be when most students don't have access to an iPad. Apple claims there are 1.5 million iPads in educational institutions but that hardly covers the actual number of students currently enrolled in K-12 in the United States. We guess the hope is that, as traditional textbooks are phased out, parents and schools will now invest in tablets for students...which of course will need to be replaced every year or two as new technology comes out.
