Apple today announced iBooks 2 for iPad, featuring iBooks textbooks. This offers iPad users fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos, and videos. Educational book publishers McGraw-Hill and Pearson are on board with the product, offering their titles on the iBookstore.
"iBooks textbooks can be kept up to date, don't weigh down a backpack and never have to be returned" states the news release from Apple.
The new iBooks 2 app is available starting today as a free download from the App Store. Most textbooks on the iBookstore are priced at $14.99 or less.
From Apple:
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.
Also announced today iBooks Author, which lets anyone with a Mac create iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, and picture books. Users can 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 users also add their own text and images by dragging and dropping. Movies, interactive photo galleries, Keynote presentations and 3D objects can also be added.
"Education is deep in Apple's DNA and iPad may be our most exciting education product yet," says Philip Schiller, Apple's senior VP of Worldwide Marketing. "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. 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."
To see an example of how tablet technology can be used as a learning tool, check out this YouTube video showing the functionality of a Solar System app.
