PublishersLunch
Apple svp of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller led off Apple's much-anticipated "education announcement" at New York's Guggenheim Museum Thursday morning, before a strictly-limited but modestly-sized audience of about 150 invitees and members of the press. (Though focused on education, guests included multiple heads of trade houses.) "This is really special for everyone at Apple, because today's event is about education. Education is deep in our DNA and has been from the very beginning." Schiller said that "as students are starting to be introduced to iPad in learning, some really remarkable things are beginning to happen." That was true to an extent: The focus of this morning's announcements were education, but the tools they launched today for free allow on-the-fly creation of "enhanced" multimedia ebooks of any kind that are designed to be uploaded and sold on the iBookstore. So Apple is empowering a new kind of self-publishing, across both educational and consumer markets, in an ecosystem that is naturally exclusive without having to call itself so. What was left unsaid, though, was how to price books when you upload to the iBookstore (and can you make your iBooks free?)
"No one person or company can fix it all," Schiller said in his intro. "One thing we hear louder than all else...is in student engagement; inspiring kids to want to discover and want to learn." It turns out, as Schiller documents, teenagers like iPads, and over 1.5 million devices are used in educational systems. That's why, Schiller said, it's time to "reinvent textbooks" since printed textbooks are "not the ideal modern teaching tool, yet the content is amazing."
That reinvention comes under the name of iBooks 2, which Schiller calls "a new textbook experience for the iPad." (The app is free and already available for download, with textbooks available for sale at the iTunes store. The store adds more category sections for easier browsing, and one of those is a prominent textbook section.) The textbooks have a swipeable menu across the bottom, reminiscent of what Push Pop Press did, or the way color magazines are rendered on tablets. There's some cool zooming in and out on graphics, the ability to organize notes and highlights of a given textbook all in one place or turn them into study cards, and 3D rotations. "Authors have total freedom to make amazing interactive experiences," Schiller said. "Your finger is always ready as a highlighter."
The iTunes store will have a dedicated textbook section, initially populated by high school textbooks priced at $14.99 and lower. Apple is working with Pearson, McGraw-Hill, DK and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: "they have been great partners with us," Schiller said." In addition the first two chapters of book in creation on Life on Earth from the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation are available today, with the entire book exclusive to the iBookstore.
Apple also introduced a way to create interactive books of all kinds with iBooks Author, also available today, for free. With the new tool, one can drag images and movies from your desktop right into the book, write directly within the app, or can just drag and drop a word file. It uses Word's style sheets to automatically create pages and headers and automatically lays out the book. It's "super simple," said product manager Roger Rosner, as text reflows automatically as you move around images and media. Keynote files and widgets (for those fluent in java or html) can also be dragged and dropped, and there's a glossary toolbar that makes it easy to highlight terms