Apple hit the Guggenheim stage in The Big Apple this morning with a media event focused on the educational market. That may not excite many Cupertino fans, but it’s enough to stimulate the tech world, which has been abuzz in the days leading up to the event, complete with speculation about how Apple might be able to reinvent it.
Apple senior vice-president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller took the stage at The Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Thursday morning at a media event focused on the educational market and how Apple plans to reinvent at least some of it. “This is really special for everyone at Apple because it’s about education,” Schiller explained. “We try to bring the same passion and energy into our education business as well.”
Schiller revealed that there are already more than 1.5 million iPads in use in educational institutions, with more than 20,000 apps available for the platform. With that, Schiller launched into the company’s first initiative: “Reinventing the textbook,” complete with an extensive comparison of traditional hardcover textbooks against the iPad (spoiler: there’s no contest), which leads into the introduction of iBooks 2.
Apple’s vice president for productivity software, Roger Rosner, takes the stage to provide a demo of the new iBooks 2, showing how a biology book can come alive with moving video, animated 3D models, zooming into photos with a pinch and even swiping to view additional graphics. "These are gorgeous, gorgeous books. They're really in a class by themselves,” Rosner said. "Clearly, no printed book can compete with this."
"Our books have two completely different reading experiences, and you can use whichever suits you best,” Rosner explained, demonstrating how iBooks 2 textbooks can easily switch from landscape to portrait, where the focus becomes more on reading and less on the graphics.
Real-time glossary definitions are also part of the package -- simply tap a word to pull up a definition, and another tap retrieves the full glossary. Definitions are no longer restricted to just words, but can also feature photos and videos as well. Textbooks can also include built-in quizzes, as Rosner demonstrated with a multiple-choice test.
No educational tool this powerful would be complete without the ability to make notes, and iBooks 2 allows students to leave the pencil and paper behind with My Notes, a section for not only creating notes but also turning them into study cards with just a tap. "I don't think there's ever been a textbook that made it this easy to be a good student,” Rosner quipped.
iBooks 2 includes a new section of the iBookstore dedicated to textbooks, and the app is now available as a free download from the App Store, with the textbooks themselves available for a mere $14.99 (or less) each. Textbook publishers Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt are all on board, with a number of science and math titles available starting today. "I can't overemphasize the importance of these partners working with us,” Phil Schiller said.
The focus then shifts to iBooks Author, a new OS X application for creating interactive textbooks -- or any type of book -- to be sold via iBooks 2. "Authors are going to love to use iBooks Create to create not only textbooks, but any kind of book,” Schiller said as Rosner returned to the stage to demonstrate the content creation software.
"Traditionally creating books is really hard, but we think we've changed all that with iBooks Author,” Rosner said. The software includes templates to make it easy for content creators to get started -- tap one and your document is instantly filled with stock Latin text and photos, then simply drag images and even movie files to replace the template elements or create your own unique layout.
Authors who use Microsoft Word can get started in a snap by simply dragging a .doc into iBooks Author -- the software automatically creates those troublesome sections and headers for you and lays out the pages like magic. Drop images into your new creation and text will reflow dynamically around them. iBooks Author even allows Keynote documents to be inserted as an interactive widget. "If you can write code in Javascript and HTML, basically you can create your own completely custom widgets,” Rosner explained.
Touting “the world’s best glossary creation tool,” Rosner demonstrated how easy it is to highlight a word, click a button and add it to your glossary, then click another button to add the definition. "If you've ever been involved in any kind of e-book creation project before you know this is a total miracle in terms of time savings,” Rosner said.
Once your e-book is completed, publishing it to the iBookstore is a snap and content creators can preview their work first on the iPad using iBooks 2.
"We wanted to make sure we could get this into the hands of not only every publisher and every author, but even every teacher,” Schiller explained as he leads into the price of iBooks Author -- absolutely free and now available from the Mac App Store.
Biology fans will get a special treat: The E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation’s Wilson’s Life on Earth is being made available as an iBooks exclusive, with the first two chapters available free of charge starting today. Additional chapters will be made available “at a very aggressive price” as they are completed.
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