Publishers’ eyes have been on the Guggenheim Museum in New York today, where Apple has just launched its plan to revolutionise the education publishing market. The company announced that it would produce new digital textbooks, across all disciplines, and make them available to users of apple computers and tablets through the iBooks store. The products are already availbale. The textbooks come in the form of ‘video, documents, apps, books, shared syllabus and assignments’, and are priced at $14.99 or less.
The major innovation is a new software programme, iBooks Author, which will allow teachers to create or modify textbooks and teaching materials to their own specifications. The software is free, which is a huge incentive for American high schools and colleges to purchase i-Pads. The blackboard truly is a thing of the past.
Apple has collaborated on this project with established education publishers, and will continue to do so. It has worked with Pearson, McGraw Hill and Dorling and Kindersley in the United States, among others. It also had similar discussions with UK publishers in recent weeks, although deatils of those talks remain scant.
The British government is committed to increasing the use of technology in schools. However, individual secondary schools chose how to spend their resources, and it remains to be seen how many schools adopt these products. Costs may prove prohibitive, particularly if iBooks Author is incompatible with cheaper PCs or old Apple computers.
The ghost of Steve Jobs stalked today’s briefing. Walter Isaacson’s recent biography revealed that Jobs had “set his sights on textbooks”, a business that is worth $8 billion a year in the US, and opened discussions in the months prior his death.
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