Apple announced the debut of iBooks 2, a “new textbook experience for the iPad” at an education-focused event in New York City’s Guggenheim Museum. The update comes as part of a push into interactive digital textbooks in partnership with a number of major publishers.
iBooks 2 is a free download from the App Store, available as an update to the existing iBooks app.
iBooks 2 — now with iBooks textbooks.
- Experience gorgeous Multi-Touch textbooks designed for iPad
- iBooks textbooks are filled with interactive features, diagrams, photos, and videos
- Tap to dive into images with interactive captions, rotate 3D objects, swipe through image galleries, watch videos in full screen, and more
- Use a finger as a highlighter when swiping over text in a textbook
- Take advantage of Study Cards to help you memorize important highlights, notes, and glossary terms
- Tap glossary terms to see definitions of key topics and concepts without leaving the page
Traditional textbooks are expensive, physically cumbersome and prone to becoming obsolete. Whereas an iPad is interactive, searchable and can be updated. But while the iPad is portable, durable and searchable, it lacks content. To that end, Apple’s iBooks 2 will be its “new textbook experience for the iPad.”
The iPad textbooks demonstrated at the event were highly interactive with 3D models, videos and manipulatable elements. Rotating the book vertically gives you a reflowed layout that emphasizes text, versus horizontally where the emphasis is images and interaction.
You can pinch the book to zip in and out of interactive media and jump to the table of contents. A linked index gives reference notes and a bibliography, and an inline dictionary aids in defining terms.
Visual and interactive Q&A centers can be found at the end of chapters that allow students to test their knowledge. iBooks 2 also includes built-in highlighting and note taking features. “Your finger is always a highlighter,” Schiller told the audience.
Once you’ve highlighted and made notes, they will appear in a collection at the end of the book in a collated section.
The books will be featured in a new Textbook section on the iBookstore and the ones that are currently up on the store are running 1GB+ in size, a good reason to buy your kids an iPad model with lots of storage. They will cover grades 7-12 with current examples running around $15. Apple's initial focus for its textbook effort is on high school textbooks, with books priced at $14.99 or less. Authors can continually update their content, and the students get to keep their copies indefinitely.
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