Apple Unveils iBooks 2, iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author

[admin]

Apple Unveils iBooks 2, iBooks Textbooks and iBooks Author
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Posted by: Staff

Apple today announced iBooks 2 for iPad, featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that's dynamic, engaging and truly interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users gorgeous, fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, videos, unrivaled navigation and much more. According to the company, iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don't weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned. Leading education services companies including Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, McGraw-Hill and Pearson will deliver educational titles on the iBookstore with most priced at $14.99 or less, and with the new iBooks Author, a free authoring tool available today, anyone with a Mac can create iBooks textbooks.

"Education is deep in Apple's DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet. With 1.5 million iPads already in use in education institutions, including over 1,000 one-to-one deployments, iPad is rapidly being adopted by schools across the US and around the world," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "Now with iBooks 2 for iPad, students have a more dynamic, engaging and truly interactive way to read and learn, using the device they already love."

The new iBooks 2 app is available today as a free download from the App Store. With support for great new features including gorgeous, fullscreen books, interactive 3D objects, diagrams, videos and photos, the iBooks 2 app will let students learn about the solar system or the physics of a skyscraper with amazing new interactive textbooks that come to life with just a tap or swipe of the finger. With its fast, fluid navigation, easy highlighting and note-taking, searching and definitions, plus lesson reviews and study cards, the new iBooks 2 app lets students study and learn in more efficient and effective ways than ever before.

iBooks Author is also available today as a free download from the Mac App Store and lets anyone with a Mac create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books and more, and publish them to Apple's iBookstore. Authors and publishers of any size can start creating with Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. iBooks Author lets you add your own text and images by simply dragging and dropping, and with the Multi-Touch widgets you can easily add interactive photo galleries, movies, Keynote presentations and 3D objects.

Apple today also announced an all-new iTunes U app giving educators and students everything they need on their iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to teach and take entire courses. With the new iTunes U app, students using iPads have access to the world's largest catalog of free educational content, along with over 20,000 education apps at their fingertips and hundreds of thousands of books in the iBookstore that can be used in their school curriculum, such as novels for English or Social Studies. The iTunes U app is available today as a free download from the App Store.



http://www.123macmini.com/news/story/1770.html

[g5g5]

Working on my interactive autobiography as we speak.

I think Apple is going to dominate the education market again. They just need to keep hardware prices in check. I know our district went with Dell because of that factor alone. It's something they regret, but it's major factor when it comes to crunch time. Even if you have the best platforms, networking and hardware.
_________________
1.25GHz Mac Mini / 1.8GHz iMac G5 / 2.0GHz C2D Mac mini (2009)
4GB iPod mini / 2G iPod shuffle / 16GB iPhone 3G
Apple TV 2
iLife's a Bitch!

[Cypher]

Textbooks look good, but they don't perform too well on my iPad 1 32GB

I downloaded the free "Life On Earth" textbook but at 1GB it takes an age to load, during which time there is no user feedback of whats going on. All I get is an unresponsive interface, the performance is awful really.

I even restored my iPad and wiped all the Music, Podcasts, apps etc off it and only installed iBooks and the textbook and it was still very slow. Once running it works ok but it has crashed a couple of times.

Textbook feel like they may be an iPad 2 feature I feel.
_________________
Phil

Mac Mini 2.53GHz - iMac 2.0Ghz - Macbook Pro 2.4GHz - iPad 1 32GB 3G
6TB Netgear Ready NAS NV+ - 6TB Drobo S

[Ray Finkle]

@Cypher mine is still downloading. Might be done by tomorrow. That's just a demo too I think. One thing Apple needs to do for this to be successful is to up the storage space on the iPads. 9 books of this size and your full with no space left for even an operating system on the base pad. We'll see.



I can't believe those cheap solid state drives aren't coming down to nothing in price yet. Makes no sense they got to be cheaper to make than a mechanical working one.

[devo]

[fiat]

Too bad that the iBooks Author requires 10.7 for installing. Anyone suggest it's time to upgrade to Lion?

[Grasshopper]

[fiat]

Tks, Grasshopper. Guess that the current new iB author isn't very useful and practical for me now any way. I may wait until newer version come out.

[Bandit Bill]

[Cypher]

[Cypher]

[curt]

[epic_ed]

I think there is more at play here. That book is crashing just as bad on my iPad 2.