Teachers Apple... Mac - iPad Textbooks

Apple have a long history of supporting the education system. Their latest project aims to revolutionise the textbook. All students, from starting school to gaining a PhD, use text books. These textbooks haven't changed for a long time... until now.

The iPad is changing the way student's conduct their studies. With the iPad you can carry around as many books as you need, without any increase in the weight of your bag. The Amazon Kindle store and Apple's iBook store both stock thousands of books. But these are just digital versions of paper books. With the hardware in the iPad the humble book is suddenly capable of so much more. This is why Apple have created a new standard for digital Textbooks, and it's built into iBooks 2, which is free on the App Store:


In these new text books you there are embedded 3D images, embedded photo gallery's and video content. They also give feedback on the multiple choice questions you get at the end of a chapter. For a preview of these features click here.

To create text books for the iPad Apple have created a new software package: iBooks Author.

iBooks Author is a free download from the Mac App Store and is full of templates and tools to create feature rich textbooks for use with the iPad. Once you have created your text book you can publish it to the iBook Store and charge for people to download your book.



What if you find a small error, or you want to update a fact to include the latest discoveries? You just update your iBook, republish to the store and Apple will notify all of your customers that a free update is available, next time they browse the iBook Store, just like the App Store does.

For more information see Apple's press release.