Initial Thoughts on iBooks 2, Author App, and Textbooks

January 19, 2012 in News with 0 Comments

ibooks2

Today Apple announced a new app for authoring e-books: iBooks Author. The app is free in the Mac App Store and makes creating an e-book a drag-and-drop process.

Publishers will now have a great tool available to create e-books by simply dragging a Word file into the application. The application then takes over and automatically formats the book. Images can then be re-sized and dragged around in text and terms and definitions can be added.

Once the book is complete it can be previewed on an iPad or uploaded directly to the iBook store.

Additionally, Apple’s Phil Schiller announced there would be a new textbook experience in iBooks 2.

While Schiller announced that they plan to include “every subject, every grade level, for every student,” they’re focusing on high school for now.

Textbook publishers McGraw-Hill, Pearson and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have partnered with Apple and two text books are available today for $14.99 each in the iBook store.

This is great news for the homeschooling community. Homeschoolers will now be able to purchase e-textbooks at a fraction of the cost of their dead tree counterparts and changes to those books can be made available without having to reprint the books or send out addenda.  Publishers of homeschooling textbooks now have a way to offer digital, interactive books to their customers for a fraction of what it used to cost.

I’m hoping homeschool publishers jump on this bandwagon and take this opportunity to easily digitize their books and get them in the iBooks store soon!

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