On Thursday Apple released a revision of its popular iBooks app along with two new apps, iTunes U and iBooks Author, both in a push to revolutionize textbooks.
The applications, design for iOS devices like iPads, iPhones, and iPods, are the next step in furthering education by offering courses and textbooks that are interactive.
iTunes U is the new app that lets teachers create and manage courses including essential components such as lectures, assignments, books, quizzes, and syllabuses, and be able to offer them worldwide to millions of users. Top universities like Cambridge, Duke, Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford are already offering content. In addition, any K-12 school district can offer full courses through the iTunes U app.
The newly released iBooks 2 application provides iBooks textbooks at a fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks, most priced at $14.99. These new interactive books offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with animations, diagrams, photos, videos, and lots more. And, because these are digital, they can be updated quickly, don’t weigh down a backpack, and never have to be returned.
Phil Schiller, Apple’s section vice president of Worldwide Marketing said, “Education is deep in Apple’s DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world. Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love.”
With most teens and young adults having iPads on their wish list, this new tool might be the incentive to provide young people with device in order to offer the latest generation in digital textbooks and courses.
For those wanting to author a textbook, Apple announced iBooks Author, a new app for designing textbooks, cookbooks, history books, and more and publish them to the Apple bookstore. The app is free, but does require Mac OS X Lion in order to run. Users still on OS 10.6 will not be able to install the app. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations and 3D objects.

