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LOS
ANGELES — Apple Inc. has already transformed the
music, mobile phone and personal computing industries,
and now the tech giant says its next chapter will be
about reinventing textbooks.
In New
York on Thursday, at the company’s first product
launch event since the death of Steve Jobs in October,
Apple announced a trio of new or updated products —
the iBooks 2, iBooks Author and iTunes U applications
— that it said would uproot the traditional learning
experience.
With the
new iBooks 2 app, students can download interactive
textbooks to their iPads, usually for $14.99 or less,
eliminating the need for a bulging backpack laden with
out-of-date, hundred-dollar textbooks. IBooks Author
enables publishers and writers to create their own books
using Mac computers and publish them to Apple’s
iBookstore. And students can use the iTunes U app to
receive course curricula, read textbooks, view
presentations and lectures, and get assignment lists
from their teachers through their mobile devices.
The apps
are available free of charge in Apple app stores.
“It’s
a game changer,” said John Bailey, former director of
educational technology at the U.S. Department of
Education, who said Apple was smart to tap into
students’ preference for and familiarity with
technology. “This is for education and publishing what
iTunes and the iPod was for music.”
The
aggressive foray into the education industry could
elevate Apple’s popular iPad tablet into a must-have
device for students, and it cranks up the competition
between the company and Amazon.com Inc. The online
retailing giant is a leader in the physical book-selling
market and recently released its first tablet, the
Kindle Fire, which was widely considered the iPad’s
first real competitor; Apple’s venture into education
could be a strategic move to get one step ahead of
Amazon before it ramps up its own e-book initiatives.
Philip
Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide
marketing, said 1.5 million iPads are already in use in
education institutions and that the tablet was
“rapidly being adopted by schools across the U.S. and
around the world.” More than 20,000 educational apps
are available in the company’s iOS App Store.
The
announcement also brought to fruition Jobs’ longtime
dream of revolutionizing the publishing space, a goal he
shared with biographer Walter Isaacson in his book
“Steve Jobs.”
“Jobs
had his sights set on textbooks as the next business he
wanted to transform,” Isaacson wrote. “He believed
it was an $8-billion-a-year industry ripe for digital
destruction. He was also struck by the fact that many
schools, for security reasons, don’t have lockers, so
kids have to lug a heavy backpack around.”
“The
iPad,” Isaacson quoted the tech visionary as saying,
“would solve that.”
The
company promised that the titles would be “an entirely
new kind of textbook that’s dynamic, engaging and
truly interactive” by featuring interactive
animations, diagrams, photos, videos and navigation.
Students would be able to highlight portions of the text
with their fingers, take notes and instantly transform
the sections into digital flashcards, for instance.
“This
is really, really different,” said Shaw Wu, senior
technology analyst at Sterne Agee. “A standard e-book
is basically a regular textbook — it’s not
interactive, it’s just in digital form. Now we’re
talking about textbooks that’ll interact like a
website.”
Apple’s
stock, which hit a record intraday high Thursday,
slipped slightly to close at $427.75.
Apple
said it teamed up with three major publishing houses —
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill Education and
Pearson — that together account for 90 percent of
textbook sales to deliver digital textbooks through its
iBookstore.
McGraw-Hill
initially will focus on offering high school math and
science titles, said Vineet Madan, the company’s
senior vice president of new ventures and strategic
services.
McGraw-Hill
already makes its instructional materials available in
some type of digital form, including companion websites
or additional images for the K-12 market, Madan said.
But Apple’s tools and the iPad’s touch screen
enabled other kinds of features, such as the ability to
manipulate 3-D molecules in virtual space. The titles
being offered on the iPad exist in print form but will
now include content such as videos, layered images and
animations.
“It’s
one thing to see a picture of a cell structure; it’s
another to see an animation of the layers of the cell
coming together,” Madan said. “It’s easier for
students to understand that than seeing one very complex
image, which is all that is possible in print.”
Pearson
said its “first wave” of books for Apple’s iPad
comprises about 7,000 pages of content, more than 100
videos and 1,000 “interactive widgets” that include
features such as 3-D animation. The publisher is
releasing several of its current high school math and
science textbooks for the platform, covering topics such
as biology, environmental science and algebra.
Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt will release “a number of titles”
for the iPad but declined to announce specific titles
Thursday. They will most likely be for the middle school
and high school markets, said Josef Blumenfeld, senior
vice president of corporate affairs.
Blumenfeld
said a big challenge will be getting more iPads, which
start at $499, into the hands of students. Deployment
“is expensive and it’s a high hurdle for a lot of
districts to overcome right now,” he said.
During
its announcement Thursday, which took place at the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Apple made no mention of
new discounts on iPads for students or schools. But Wu
said students who go the iPad route for their textbooks
would quickly find it to be cost-effective.
“The
initial cost may be high, but the whole ownership cycle
is probably cheaper because you just carry that one iPad,”
he said. “Doing it this way is actually lowering costs
over the longer haul.”
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