Not content with reinventing the mobile phone and the portable music player, Apple have set their sites on academia. Those lofty and expensive bits of dead tree known as textbooks could be next to be confined to the (digital) history books.
Phil Schiller took to the stage in New York yesterday to talk about Apple’s new iBooks 2 app – a re-imagining of the ebook store featured on iDevices. Schiller told the assembled masses it’d be the start of a revolution in educational publishing. Critics reckoned that it was a rather cunning ploy to sell more iPads, Macs and iBooks to universities, colleges and schools. While the announcement will have more of an impact Stateside, where content deals are already in place, it’s an interesting taste of things to come…
Digital textbooks obviously have merits – the ability to zoom in and out, take 3D models for a spin or engage with embedded sound and video are, when carefully applied, a huge improvement on the dull, dusty tomes we remember from school. Add in search, regular updates, interactive quizzes and the ability scribble and annotate to your heart’s content and our nightmarish memories of ”Tricolore” (our secondary school French textbook) should fade into obscurity.
Textbooks will set users back just shy of $15 – which compares very favourably with more pricey pulp-based equivalents. So, what chance success? We reckon it depends on whether Apple can come up with an institution-wide licencing model and whether parents see the advantage of stumping up for iPads. Developers have an opportunity to convince and lacklustre ports of paper tomes just won’t cut the mustard, hence Apple’s launch of iBook Author.
The Author app is designed for making textbooks from scratch – with the ability to import Word files and have them auto-formatted and then add in extras like photogalleries and even code up your own widgets before publishing to the App Store.
A further sign of Apple taking the educational coin seriously sees the iTunes U university portal get its own app which sucks in podcasts, course materials and lecture notes into one place.
Digital publishing is definitely gaining traction and – as part of a wider digital strategy – it’s worth thinking about how much of your company information needs to appear in print or on the web. Giving thought to e-publications over more traditional books, leaflets and pamphlets is also worth some thought – saving money and delivering better experiences for users.
No comments yet.