Apple Reveals New Digital Textbook Apps for iPad

Apple has unveiled two new iPad apps designed to transform the way students and educators read and engage with textbooks.

The company introduced the new apps, called iBook 2 and iBook Author, during its highly anticipated education announcement Thursday. Both apps are free and already available for download.

IBooks 2 is a textbook software program that allows students to read and interact with "gorgeous, fullscreen" digital textbooks, Apple said. With the app, students can seamlessly jump to different sections of a textbook by swiping digital pages, tapping index links, or jumping to specific page numbers for “super fast, super fluid navigation,” on the iPad said Roger Rosner, vice president of productivity applications at Apple.

IBooks 2 also touts a number of features designed to make textbook reading more interactive. Students have access to glossaries, are able to highlight important excerpts with the swipe of a finger, and can populate "study cards" -- essentially digital versions of traditional, lined index cards -- for test preparation. Movies and interactive diagrams are also strewn throughout the textbook pages.

"Clearly, no printed book can compete with this," said Rosner.

A new textbook category has already been added to the iBookstore, where users can search for books by category and grade level. The one-time price of textbooks is capped at $14.99, and students can re-download the content from the cloud at any time, Apple said. High school textbooks will initially be available from Apple publishing partners Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin.

The new iBook Author app is designed for digital textbook creation, rather than consumption. Authors and publishers can design and customize interactive textbooks optimized for the iPad by dragging images, word files, and movies into built-in templates. The content creation platform can also support embedded interactive images, slideshows, and custom-built glossaries. iBook Author is available free in the App Store.

According to Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, classrooms and students of all levels are turning to the iPad more and more as a tool for learning.

"Education is deep in Apple's DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world," Schiller said. "Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love."

In addition to iBook 2 and iBook Author, Apple introduced a revamped iTunes U application. The new app serves as a course-management system for both students and educators and is seemingly geared more toward the higher education sector.

Through iTunes U, teachers can post course assignments and syllabi, while students can keep track of upcoming or completed assignments, and even stream lectures to watch remotely.

Like iBook 2 and iBook Author, iTunes U is app is available for free in the App Store.