
Apple unveiled iBooks 2, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. iBooks will make available text books for high-school students and it will be priced at $14.99 or less. The move is expected to save students hundreds if not thousands of dollars.
Eventually, Apple said, it expects textbooks for almost every subject and grade level from kindergarten through to university, to be available on iBooks.
To kick things off, textbook from leading publishers McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which account for 90% of the $8 billion text book publishing market, will be available on iBooks.
The digital textbook market is young but growing. Only about 6% of education-textbook sales will be digital this year, up from 3% in 2011, according to textbook distributor MBS Direct Digital, but that number is expected to rise to more than 50% by 2020.
Over 1,000 education institutions already use the iBooks companion product iTunes U, which has 20,000 education apps which have been downloaded over 700 million times.
iBooks 2 allows users to take notes, create study cards, search within text, and take quizzes, among other features. “The bottom line is immediate feedback,” said Roger Rosner, Apple’s vice president for productivity applications, in charge of its iWork document, spreadsheet and presentation software.
The new iBooks has a feature called iBooks Author that will allow, authors, publishers and users to create and publish their own textbooks. It allows teachers and authors to create full online courses with syllabuses, assignments and lectures. Apple said six universities already have made more than 100 courses available for free. With iBooks Author, developers can use Apple-designed templates to create textbooks with interactive media. All the products will be available free in Apple’s App store.
iBooks was the brain child of Apple co-founder the Great Steve Jobs, who had long aimed to reform education with technology. The Great One, had set his sights on the textbook market, envisioning lowering the cost of textbooks by distributing them on the iPad, according to people familiar with the matter.