Apple Launches Digital Textbooks, iBooks Author Tool

Posted on January 22, 2012

Apple announced new electronic textbook features and partnerships with major electronic publishers at a recent press conference. Apple partnered with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson to offer digital textbooks (called iBooks textbooks) with interactive animations and high quality diagrams and photographs. The textbooks also have highlighting and note-taking features and digital study cards.

Apple says most of the digital textbooks will cost $14.99 or less. You can view some of the digital textbooks here.

Apple also debuted a new iTunes U app, which lets teachers create and manage courses, including electures, assignments, books, quizzes, and syllabuses.

Apple also launched iBooks Author, a free app from the Mac App Store, that enables anyone to create a book for the iPad. There has been some criticism of Apple for using a proprietary file format for its iBooks author files, but Amazon does this with the Kindle as well.