Apple joins e-textbook party with iBooks, iBooks Author apps

— -- Apple is bringing its brand-name power to the fledgling market for electronic textbooks.

IBooks 2, a free app for reading interactive full-screen digital textbooks that makes liberal use of video and animations, was unveiled Thursday in New York by Phil Schiller, Apple's senior vice president for worldwide marketing.

Apple also announced iBooks Author, a free software application for Macintosh computers with custom templates to help authors create and publish their own digital textbooks.

Apple is broadening its iTunes U program beyond audio and video lectures by adding an app for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that allows professors to create full online courses, with assignments, books, quizzes and syllabi. Previously available only for the higher-education market, Apple is letting K-12 schools participate for the first time.

Apple's hope is that students will find the new textbooks engaging. Students studying high school biology, for example, can view 3D animated models of structures within a cell. They can tap a word for a glossary definition and drag their finger to highlight a passage. The material can be updated. And the books can automatically turn student notes into study cards.

The late Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, had long been interested in education, and believed it to be an $8 billion market ripe for "digital destruction," biographer Walter Issacson writes in Steve Jobs.

E-books represent less than 10% of the textbook market for the K-12 market, according to Simba Information, a market research firm.

Apple is stepping up its efforts in a complex and competitive industry in which publishers, book distributors and start-ups are also pitching their digital platforms for buying and reading e-books and utilizing learning supplements such as quizzes, videos and social-networking tools.

And Apple isn't the only company trying to reinvent textbooks.

Bay Area start-ups Kno and Inkling are among the lesser-known outfits trying to make names for themselves in the space.

"No one is saying technology is the only part of the solution," Schiller said in an interview. "But it is a key piece of the solution. It can enable the teacher to have tools to excite kids that are otherwise hard to reach."

Though Apple is targeting the new textbooks at any age or grade level, the initial emphasis is on high school textbooks. Books will be priced at $14.99 or less. Early publishing partners include Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which collectively control 90% of the market, with some titles available immediately.

Pearson CIO and Director of Digital Strategy Genevieve Shore says, "Although we kind of use the metaphor of the book to describe what these products are, they're not really books at all. It's hard to do comparisons. One of the books we have has 50 hours of video in it, so that's a completely new set of interesting material that students have never had before."

Apple is also working with DK Publishing on titles that cover

dinosaurs, insects, mammals and the ABCs.

Life on Earth from noted biologist E.O. Wilson is also being made available; the first two chapters are free, with the additional 39 chapters (coming over 24 months) "aggressively priced."