Yesterday Apple hosted a special event at the Guggenheim Museum in New York to announce a product that would change education. They announced iBooks 2, featuring interactive textbook support for iPad. At the end of the presentation, Apple announced an exciting expansion of their iTunes U offering. For me, though, the biggest surprise was the release of a free Mac application for creating textbooks called iBooks Author.

In the beginning of the presentation Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller said electronic textbooks were superior paper textbooks. He said electronic textbooks are more portable, durable, interactive, searchable, and current than traditional textbooks.

He ceded that both types of textbooks contain great content. A nice hat tip to the textbook publishers in the room.

I didn’t agree with all of Phil’s argument. There’s a low tech solution to the portability problem. Have students keep their textbooks at home and use an in-class copy. Schools need to buy just one extra copy. The take-home books should wear out more slowly because they are not carried around as much.

And dead-tree textbooks can really take a beating! Ever dropped an iPad?

However, there’s no doubt that the iPad has a rich selection of education and productivity apps that make it an excellent learning tool. iBooks textbooks give us one more thing to add to the arsenal.

Only Available for iPad

iBooks textbooks are only available on the iPad. Why just the iPad? Obviously its the only iOS device with a screen large enough to display full pages of content alongside rich interactive elements. Not a problem.

What about the Mac, then? Nope. You can not read iBooks on a Mac. I didn’t mis-type that. This is not a special limitation for textbooks. No iBooks can be read on the world’s best personal computer. (Cough! Amazon Kindle!)

Part of me thinks this is an early days limitation that will be resolved in a future release. The cynical side of me suspects its part of a copyright protection scheme.

Sure. Reading on a large computer screen at a desk is not ideal. And a laptop is pretty crappy for reading too. So I never had a problem with this limitation. My Kindle is ideal for reading novels. And I turn to my iPad when reading books with full color illustrations, programing code samples, and when I need faster searching and page turns than the Kindle.

But, research and content creation is far more productive on a Mac than an iPad. It would be great to have the textbook–with your embedded notes and highlights–available on screen when writing a paper or creating a Keynote presentation. Yes. You can do those things on an iPad. The process is much smoother on a computer with a keyboard and a mouse with multiple windows open at once.

</rant>

Authoring Problem: Solved?

In my previous post I mentioned that one of the big problems we face is that writing e-books with advanced content and layout requirements is very complex. I think iBooks Author solves this problem well, even for a first version. It’s extremely easy to use. I can definitely see people creating their own books with it.

I investigated EPUB 3 for a project last Spring. I wanted to use EPUB 3’s content overlay feature to highlight the words in a book in sync with a narration. But I didn’t have the resources to create my own reader application. iBooks should be able to host that content now. I’ll have to investigate this.

Another intriguing feature of iBooks Author is HTML widgets. HTML widgets allow iBooks to include interactive elements created in Dashcode. What I want to find out is if these widgets can access the Internet from within the book. My first guess would be: no. I can see Internet access being blocked for security purposes. But I hope it’s not. Having access to the ‘net from a widget would allow me to combine a textbook with services like the Townsend Press Learning Center.

Definitely interesting times.