Apple Inc. has recently introduced iBooks2, successor to the popular e-book reading app iBooks at the Big Apple education event held in NewYork on 19th January. Well, it would be better to say that Apple has reinvented textbooks for the iPad. iBooks2 comes with a host of great new features but the one that stands out among them is the new textbooks section of iBooks. Apple has partnered with leading education companies like McGraw Hill, Pearson, DK, Houghton Mifflin for this and the result is a very rich interactive and innovative media for students to read.
The Cupertino based technology giant pointed out that the main problem for teachers is to create enthusiasm among students and to make them interested in what they are learning. Apple believes that the only way to achieve this is by changing the way in which people learn, by making textbooks as interactive as they can be. They claim that rich media and interactive content make people to use these textbooks more and thereby helps education. iBooks never get outdated as they get delta updates from the iBookstore and are always up to date. eTextbooks are way portable (weightless of course), they last forever, and they are also searchable.
The video above demonstrates how cool this app really is. The new note taking mechanism and the remainder cards just blow our minds away. If you have a problem with these fancy page layouts you can at anytime shift the iPad to portrait mode to get all the text at one place as in Safari reader and all the interactive content in the left margin. iBooks 2 scores heavily due to aggressive pricing of its eTextbooks. They will be priced at $14.99 or less which is way cheaper than a printed textbook. The multi touch gestures of Mac OS X have been integrated very deeply into iBooks 2 and this makes it a pleasure to use this app. There are also gorgeous 3D animations , expanding images, support for html5 pluggins in this app. The new iBooks glossary is a new way to learn about unknown things.
This innovative app has its own limitations. These interactive textbooks have sizes of around 1GB(only 60 pages book) due to the very rich media content. This will surely make people with 16GB iPads to worry a lot. Besides for people with slow internet connections it will take forever to download and access these books. Even an iPad 2 with the A5 dual core processor takes time to read these interactive textbooks.There are occasional crashes too. But nevertheless this app is a huge leap forward in education and Apple has got everything right here. For those of you who are still wandering how apple reinvented textbooks with this app, here are the figures, Apple has already sold 3,50,000 textbooks in its first three days, that too with only a limited collection of 8 textbooks. Several other textbooks from leading publishers will be available very shortly through the iBookstore.
However, however technology goes ahead, it may never completely replace text-books because of our constant need to refer back and forth, flip through the book, refer the extra tables, etc. As an engineering student, I would still prefer to have a physical book, along with the availability of the animations, etc, when required. Sometimes I need to refer the same topic across multiple books to get a complete understanding, or the full picture. Maybe, as the trend continues, references will be drawn up on the page itself, intelligently. That is the day when eBooks truly have a shot at completely replacing Textbooks.
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Nice stuff dear.i am glad to infom you i am very happy to see this post and i like it.
Let’s hope that through this innovative way of learning, students will be more focused to study and learn. I agree as to how cheaper a $14 eTextbook is compared to the traditional ones. But I wonder how this iBook actually cost, though.
Great post.I have enjoyed and benefited very much.I hope such post more and more.Thanks to author.
Great article. We all know that maybe in 10years from now, no one is using notebooks anymore. But we all hope that this innovation can’t make new generation forget the usefulness of simple things.
Will apple bring out a iphone more advanced or just a brand new model of a iphone…………..if so when is the expected date or is the Iphone 3g the last version of the Iphone.
Apple unveiled today iBooks 2, a “new textbook experience” for the iPad and the company’s attempt to bury traditional schoolbooks.
“Clearly, no printed textbook can compete,” Roger Rosner, an Apple vice president, said during a press event this morning at New York’s Guggenheim Museum.
The company also announced iBooks Author, a free app for self-publishing e-books, and improvements to the iTunes U app that puts entire courses online and allows instructors to post syllabi and messages for students.
Before unveiling the plan, Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, noted the sad state of current textbooks. They aren’t portable, searchable, current, or interactive, he said.
“We want to reinvent the textbook,” Schiller said. He noted that more than 20,000 educational apps are already available for the iPad and that more than 1.5 million iPads are already in use in education.
great article, keep posting more about the new innovation, it really help us a lot.