Apple selling interactive iPad textbooks
2012-01-19 20:52
New York - Apple on Thursday launched its attempt to make the iPad a replacement for a satchel full of textbooks by starting to sell electronic versions of a handful of standard high-school books.
The electronic textbooks, which include "Biology" and "Environmental Science" from Pearson and "Algebra 1" and "Chemistry" from McGraw-Hill, contain videos and other interactive elements.
But it's far from clear that even a company with Apple's clout will be able to reform the primary and high-school textbook market.
The printed books are bought by schools, not students, and are reused year after year, which isn't possible with the electronic versions. New books are subject to lengthy state approval processes.
Major textbook publishers have been making electronic versions of their products for years, but until recently, there hasn't been any hardware suitable to display the books. PCs are too expensive and cumbersome to be good e-book machines for students.
Dedicated e-book readers like the Kindle have small screens and can't display color. IPads and other tablet computers work well, but iPads cost at least $499. Apple didn't reveal any new programme to defray the cost of getting the tablet computers into the hands of students.
All this means textbooks have lagged the general adoption of e-books, even when counting college-level works that students buy themselves. Forrester Research said e-books accounted for only 2.8% of the $8 billion US textbook market in 2010.
The new textbooks are legible with a new version of the free iBooks application, which became available on Thursday.
iBook Author
The textbooks will cost $15 or less, said Phil Schiller, Apple's head of marketing. He unveiled the books at an event at New York's Guggenheim Museum. Schools will be able to buy the books for its students and issue redemption codes to them, he said.
The company also revealed iBook Author, an application for Macs that lets people create electronic textbooks.
According to biographer Walter Isaacson, reforming the textbook market was a pet project of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, even in the last year of his life.
At a dinner in early 2011, Jobs told News Corp chair Rupert Murdoch that the paper textbooks could be made obsolete by the iPad.
Jobs wanted to circumvent the state certification process for textbook sales by having Apple release textbooks for free on the tablet computer.
Jobs died in October after a long battle with cancer.
- AP
